Barrier Dune Flyover: Saquish Beach at Plymouth, Massachusetts
What I'm working on: Until the late 1980's or so, coastal shoreline homeowners were encouraged to pile up Christmas trees at the base of dunes. Local departments of public works assisted; participants assumed the discarded trees reinforced te dunes against erosion. The theory: the vortexes the discarded trees created in the wind broke up airflow, causing sand particles to drop in place in and behind the trees. Methods have changed since. The present trend is snow fencing and beachgrass planting. Some experiments have shown that upright pieces of split shingles do the same. Recently I borrowed the local cable access station's DJI Spark to see what it was like to fly, and see what its video looked like. Here's raw footage I shot with the Spark of a barrier dune that divides a coastal bay from an estuarine marsh. Notice the chopped telephone poles once used for chainlink fence dune enforcement. Homeowners piled up their discarded Christmas trees behind the...