The Impact of Sea Water Immersion on the Viability of Psammophilous Species Carex Colchica and Its Capacity as Dune Stabilizer

Tall Wheatgrass (Thinopyrum ponticum): Flood Resilience, Growth Response to Sea Water Immersion, and Its Capacity for Erosion and Flooding Control of Coastal Areas

“…The temporal expression of plant species survival can be presented as a critical decomposition time (CDT) by linking the duration of flooding and resilience of plant species. CDT is a parameter that is subjectively defined on visible morphological changes and represents the smallest degree of irreversible decay of vegetative organs (more than 15% of the whole vegetative organ surface), and it indicates that the plants will not survive flooding with longer duration and their communities will not be able to recover [3,8,12,28,29]. Table 1.…”

“…The risk of flooding and erosion is increasing for many coastal areas due to a cumulative effect of global climate changes, frequent storm surges, sea level rise and intensified anthropogenic impact [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]. These areas, with their naturally established coastal dunes, perform important ecosystem services such as protection against storm waves, storm surges, and high tides [9].…”

“…The most significant issues in coastal dune management are related to the mitigation of negative impacts during and consequences after unusual storms and floods with different origins [8]. The holistic approach of integrated coastal zone management recommends nature-based mitigation strategies based on the replacement of artificial coastal protection and stabilization structures with dunes stabilized with plants [12,14].…”

“…Thereby, plants stabilize sand and act as supporters that increase the dunes' ability to reduce storm damages and effectively minimize erosion with minimal negative impacts to natural ecosystems [13,15,18]. That is why searching for native salt-tolerant plant species with extensive root systems and investigating their capacity for flooding and erosion control is fundamental to the practice of ecologically sound ecosystem services [8,13,19]. Introducing invasive non-native species to provide desired services for reducing or eliminating erosion and flooding are not always appropriate.…”

“…sabulosus [25,28], Carex colchica J. Gay [8,28], and Galilea mucronata (L.) Parl. [12,13,28], which show a high viability to the stress of flooding in short-term intervals.…”