Aeolian Sand Transport
Oral
Bianca Charbonneau, MS
PhD Candidate
University of Pennsylvania
With ERDC and USGS funding, we built a removable bed unilateral flow wind tunnel to test how the morphology among and within dominant US East coast foredune plants feeds back on bedform creation around individual plants at a baseline of zero (i.e. flat back beach or post storm). We found that plant species varied in morphology and biomass was the most informative morphological variable. Bedforms formed in all experimental trials and we are able to see differences in accumulation as a function of species and biomass as effects. Bedforms did not form in the absence of plants.