This week, my Google travels had me land somewhere more civilised than the previous episode... given that we were last at a place literally called 'inaccessible island', that's not saying much, but still, I think you could even guess where I landed based on this rather distinct peninsula:

You are correct! New Zealand! What gave it away, the title?

In fact, we landed right on the tip o' the boot:

Aupōuri Peninsula

But where to go from here? It's mostly farmland and little forests from the look of things, but I couldn't help but notice the random sand dunes at the bottom left. What's that all about?

Though they look pretty cool, I imagine they're not much more than a tourist attraction, similar to the ones you can find in Vietnam. good for a photo opportunity to make you look like a real traveler, rather than the pumpkin latte-drinking metrosexual that you really are.

_{Clearly, the parking lot is just over the other side of that hill}

As it turns out, this miniature desert appears to be a remnant of a much larger desert, having lost 70% of sand dunes to mankind. This seems a little like the opposite of what we normally do in our destructive practices, but New Zealanders considered the desert a waste of space, and instead decided to fill it up with introduced species, golf courses and houses.

The idea of deserts being a wasteland is kind of an outdated way of thought, and the remaining desert is now protected, allowing the unique environment to keep its sandy nature alive. There really is more life in the sand than you may imagine, even plants such as the pingao* and spifinex plants I'm sure you're all vaguely aware of. They may not look like much, but they provide a lovely home for all kinds of insects, rodents, crabs and whatever else lives near the sea.

Where did all the sand come from?

This took a little digging, but there are basically two types of sand dune systems; open and closed.

A closed system is where the sand comes from a supply that was formed long ago, and the open system is, of course, a presently replenishing supply.

Typical examples of the closed system of dunes occur on the Eastern coasts of New Zealand, which create little more than a large beach, such as Pākiri Beach:

But our giant Aupōuri dunes have an open supply, with much of the sand being supplied from volcanoes further inland. We can assume that this information is referring to Mount Ruapehu, an active volcano bang in the middle of the Northern island.

Over millions of years, sediment from various eruptions (with the lasts one occurring in 2007) would have landed in and been washed down Waikato river, which I've handily demonstrated its journey here, seemingly originating from the lake directly at the base of the volcano:

The Threat of Sand

Dunes can be a scary thing ecologically speaking. The general threat of soil erosion and desertification is very real and can be devastating, which would justify somewhat replacing them with golf courses if the threat was very real. Of course it doesn't help if you walk around burning the the natural grass as was recalled by settlers in this region:

In the 1880s in winter, settler families often made all-night watches for frostfish, which washed up on beaches north of Dunedin. One settler recalls: ‘[T]he boys used to set fire to the native grass, and night after night saw patches of the sandhills ablaze. In places the grass disappeared altogether, and at these points the strong north-east wind cut its way through, opening up long hollows through the protecting sandhills and carrying the sand over the flat in long, straight lines, or spreading it out fan-shaped.’_{Murray Gladstone Thomson}

Shockingly, around the same time of that quote, the drifting coastal sand was estimated to take up about 40,000 hectares. 30 years later, that estimate was 120,000 hectares, largely due to such practices and vast farming land.

in 1908, the government unleashed the Sand Drift Act, which did nothing, leading to farmers taking matters into their own hands and planting a bunch of grass around the borders of the dunes.

Their next attempt required hiring New Zealand's greatest botanist, Leonard Cockayne to have a look, whose 1911 report said to copy the French who fixed this problem at Gascony coast with a continuous display of vegetation of both plants and trees at the mouths of the criminal rivers causing all this mess.

It went underfunded and thus failed to make much of a difference.

What we really needed was an economic depression. Struggling to create jobs, the Public Works Department looked into this and found a small solution:

Gangs of men lived in camps, planting marram grass and other exotic species.

By 1951, about 14,000 hectares of sand was replaced with plantlife, and by the 70's they really had a routine fully figured out:

• Build fore dunes (dunes close to the sea), using barriers such as mānuka fences and radiata pine prunings.
• Plant marram.
• Sow yellow tree lupin.
• Plant radiata pine on the coastal edge.
• Plant commercial forests in the lee of the shelter achieved

By the 80's, entire forests had taken over and by now an estimated 200,000 hectares of dune had been replaced, leaving a mere 40,000 alone - the same estimation they had in the 1880's before they started messing it all up!

But now, the desert is still slowly being lost and we want a way to continuously interfere, so we're looking at restoring it by literally replanting dunes and their deserty plant counterparts.

So there you have it - You're damned no matter what you do. That's the lesson we can learn here. I think.

_{*The native sand-binding sedge pīngao is a botanical loner. One ecologist wrote that the plant ‘has no near relatives anywhere in the world — a sign of long, isolated ancestry. Pingao has presided over eons of dune-building and shoreline changeNeville Peat and Erwin Brinkmann}

References: _{Dune Lands | Dune-building phases in the Manawatu district, New Zealand | Late Holocene development of two wetlands in the Te Paki region, far northern New Zealand}

_{Images all from Google or Public Domain. Pingao image from flickr}

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