Multi-year persistence of beach habitat degradation from nourishment using coarse shelly sediments

Dominant macrobenthic populations experience sustained impacts from annual disposal of fine sediments on sandy beaches

“…Because benthic macroinvertebrates of sandy beaches deliver the valued ecosystem services of providing important, accessible, and dense food resources for crabs, juvenile surf fishes, and resident, migrating, and breeding shorebirds (McLachlan & Brown 2006), spoil disposal has the potential to cause losses of prey subsidies to higher trophic levels on a local scale. Declines in these prey resources from ocean beaches can have cascading impacts on shorebirds , Peterson et al 2006, 2014 and fishes (Lasiak 1986, Hackney et al 1996, Manning et al 2013.…”

“…Subsequent field studies (Rakocinski et al 1996, Peterson et al 2000) and reviews (Hackney et al 1996, Greene 2002 have reinforced this view. Augmenting the coarse fraction of sediments and shell hash on the beach can have similarly large effects on the infauna, especially on burrowing bivalves (McLachlan 1996, Peterson et al 2006, 2014.…”

Response of intertidal sandy-beach macrofauna to human trampling: An urban vs. natural beach system approach

“…Although tourism has undoubted economic benefits, it is usually associated with substantial environmental costs (Davenport and Davenport, 2006). Different studies concerning nourishment (Leewis et al, 2012;Peterson et al, 2014;, beach cleaning (Dugan and Hubbard, 2010;Gilburn, 2012), and coastal armoring Hubbard et al, 2013) have shown the negative effects of these actions on the beach fauna, mainly because they cause changes in the habitat, destroy the dune systems, change the natural physical characteristics of the beaches, eliminate food sources, and reduce habitats and shelter areas, among others. Furthermore, these actions indirectly affect other components of the food chain, such as shorebirds and fish, due to a reduction in their food sources (Defeo et al, 2009).…”

Effects of Repeated Sand Replenishment Projects on Runs of a Beach-Spawning Fish, the California Grunion

“…The slope, timing, frequency, amount and type of materials placed on the beach are all tested and managed, as all may affect the biota that either live there permanently or use the beach ecosystem for some part of their life cycle [3][4][5][6]. The effects of beach nourishment are poorly known for most beach biota, either in the shorter-or longer-term [7][8][9]. Knowing how coastal ecosystems and beaches and their sediments respond to storm conditions and repeated beach replenishments is a pressing question for resource managers, particularly because beach replenishment is now the preferred option in the United States for short-term stabilization of any eroding coastline which is used for valued recreation or tourism [10].…”