Seashore dune rehabilitation using an inland legume species

Dunes along seashores are vulnerable ecosystems that contain special resources and provide important services. Most of them today suffer from trampling due to human recreational use, and rehabilitating them is urgent for the sake of coast safety and human welfare. We examine whether sowing an inland legume species is a feasible, effective method for fast rehabilitating degraded backshore dunes. The rehabilitation experiment was conducted from 2012 in the Shandong Peninsula, China, where Astragalus adsurgens, an inland legume species, was intensively sown within degraded dune systems. We surveyed the recovering plant communities in 2016 by 100 quadrats of 1 m². We measured coverage‐weighted height of each species in these quadrats, and evaluated potential role of A. adsurgens in restoring such backshore dune systems. We found that A. adsurgens established and grew successfully, thus contributing much to dune rehabilitation, and that it exerted no significant negative effects on native plants. This species did not overgrow to achieve a too large niche width, presumably limited by its innate intolerance to seawater inundation. Sowing this inland legume species is believed to be feasible and effective for backshore dune rehabilitation, and the sowing in the long run cannot overturn distinctiveness of the original backshore vegetation.