Coastal beach-dune dynamics and management under future climate change

This project will focus on understanding ecosystem services provided by ocean beaches in the CLLMM region, and how distinct stakeholder groups perceive potential conflicts and threats to those services from current human activities, as well as future threats which may come from climate change.

 

Ocean beaches are dynamic ecosystems that provide critical habitat for biodiversity, including shorebirds and bivalves.  They are subject to varying natural influences, but also a range of direct and indirect threatening processes from humans.

The CLLMM region includes the 190-km Younghusband Peninsula and 20-km Goolwa Beach beaches on either side of the Murray Mouth. The nature and degree of threats vary along these beaches, and include vehicle disturbance, recreational and commercial bivalve harvest, pest animals and plants, pollution, erosion and habitat degradation, and climate change and its impacts such as sea level rise. 

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Although there have been previous (expert) assessments of coastal threats along the lower south-east of SA, including the CLLMM region, key to managing human threats is understanding people’s motivation for their use of beaches and their (sometimes mis)perceptions about the impacts they are actually having. This project aims to fill that gap by assessing people’s understanding of, and their motivations (or not) for protecting beaches and their ecology.

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This project will have four related components:

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• Development of public data collection tool through the development of a Public Participation Geographic Information System (PPGIS). The PPGIS will collect spatially explicit information from stakeholders about where/how people use the CLLMM beaches and what they value most about different areas.  It will be developed iteratively with a smaller set of stakeholders helping to establish the preliminary tool by December 2024 before wider roll out during early 2025 to capture high use times and allow UniSA vacation research students to promote/recruit stakeholders in the field. The aim will be to produce a (GIS-based) tool stakeholders can use easily to plot where they use beaches and what aspects are important to them, allowing freedom to input aspects they feel are important, not constrained to specific questions posed by researchers. The PPGIS will continue into winter 2025, aiming for as many contributions as possible (>100 across multiple stakeholder groups), progressively creating an (interactive web-) map that we will analyse spatially and stakeholders will also be able to also query themselves once complete.

• Semi-structured interviews with a subset of representative stakeholders from different groups identified in the PPGIS. Up to 40 PPGIS participants will be invited to take part in interviews where in-depth discussions will be used to get a better understanding of perspectives, including how they perceive and value different aspects of beaches and assess threats from themselves and other stakeholders, along with how potential management options and the potential impacts of climate change.

• Although people’s perceptions of values and threats are a focus of this project, grounding that against existing scientific knowledge on the ecology and threats to ocean beaches is important. This will be done via a literature review of publicly available documents, including published papers, technical documents and reports, management plans, research theses, and other sources.

• Additionally, a meta-database of the source and location of (relevant) existing historical and ongoing ecological and human use data will be collated (e.g. pipi fishery records, bird nesting records, pest surveys, fishing competition numbers, beach litter collection etc.).