Author(s): Davide Demichele; Carlo Camporeale

Linked Author(s): Carlo Camporeale

Keywords: Coastal dunes resilience; Eco-morphodynamics; Vegetation recovery times

Abstract: Coastal dunes are ecotones protecting shorelines by buffering wave energy, stabilizing sediments, and sustaining diverse plant communities. These ecosystems are increasingly stressed by storms, sea-level rise, wildfires, and human disturbance. Dune resilience mainly depends on the recovery capabilities of vegetation, driving rapid sediment trapping and sand stabilization. The dynamics of coastal vegetation is, to these days, still difficult to fully grasp, as it emerges from the complex interact ions between biotic and abiotic processes. Existing modelling approaches —process-based, ecogeomorphic, cellular, and aeolian— has been developed to explore dune–vegetation interactions, highlight ing key vegetation –sediment feedback but often rely on complex, computationally intensive formulations. Growing evidence also shows that stochastic approaches such as random disturbance timing and colonization strongly shape early succession and recovery dynamics. Here, we derive an analytical formulation for the recovery time of coastal vegetation —namely, the average time required for the vegetation to recover from a degraded to an optimal state — based on a 1-D minimal stochastic model (Camporeale and Latella, 2025) that captures the essential mechanisms governing coastal vegetation growth while remaining analytically tractable. This framework offers a simple yet powerful tool for exploring dune recovery and coastal eco-morphodynamics without the burden of heavy numerical simulations.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.64697/iahr.proc.ise2026.abs.339

Year: 2026