PlumX Metrics
Embed PlumX Metrics

Curonian Spit Coastal Dunes Landscape: Climate Driven Change Calls for the Management Optimization

Land, ISSN: 2073-445X, Vol: 11, Issue: 6
2022
  • 2
    Citations
  • 0
    Usage
  • 10
    Captures
  • 0
    Mentions
  • 7
    Social Media
Metric Options:   Counts1 Year3 Year

Metrics Details

  • Citations
    2
    • Citation Indexes
      2
  • Captures
    10
  • Social Media
    7
    • Shares, Likes & Comments
      7
      • Facebook
        7

Article Description

On the Curonian Spit, the leading conservation issue is an opposition between the two contrasting nature-management principles—anthropocentricity and biocentricity. Land managers still waver between the two options, and the worst-case scenario materializes as a rapid proliferation of vegetation to the accumulative sandplain (palve). It results in the decline of sand drift to the mobile dunes. This article aims to examine how climate change affects the coastal dune landscape and to identify current dune protection and management priorities. The analysis of hydroclimatic changes; succession patterns in forest, herbaceous, and open-sand ecosystems; and phenologicalbased evaluation (NDVI from MODIS, 2000–2020), influencing possible management directions, were carried out in this study. The results show the significant hydro-climatic changes (air temperature, precipitation, and sea level) occurring over the last thirty years. They influence the prevailing overgrowth trends in recent decades, especially in herbaceous ecosystems. Therefore, if the EU’s priority habitat—open-sand ecosystems—is to be preserved, the main policy recommendation is to apply adequate management tools such as grazing, and to pay more attention to the aesthetic ecosystem services of the mobile dunes parallel to biodiversity conservation.

Bibliographic Details

Rasa Šimanauskienė; Rita Linkevičienė; Jonas Satkūnas; Aldona Baubinienė; Julius Taminskas; Darijus Veteikis; Ramūnas Povilanskas

MDPI AG

Environmental Science

Provide Feedback

Have ideas for a new metric? Would you like to see something else here?Let us know