Source(s):
Mike Kane mkane@ifas.ufl.edu, (352) 392-1831 ext. 205
Maia McGuire MPMcGuire@ifas.ufl.edu, (904) 824- 4564
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — As Florida digs out from its worst hurricane season in more than a century, a University of Florida professor is nurturing an army of tiny reconstruction workers.
In a brightly lit lab on the UF campus, Mike Kane grows hundreds of specimens of the sea oat — the humble grass that serves as the first line of defense against hurricane damage. He’s trying to find the strongest plants to guard Florida’s beaches against the next major storm.
“These plants can stabilize sand dunes, build new dunes and protect property for a fraction of what it would cost to do these things through engineering alone,” said Kane, a professor of environmental horticulture at UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. “I want to find plants that do that job best and make sure they’re available for use in beach reconstruction projects.”
The sea oat is a coastal plant that literally holds the beach together. Growing sea oats send out complex networks of deep roots and stems that can hold sand in place even when waves and wind try to carry it away. The plant also puts out tall stalks that can serve as a windbreak, catching airborne sand and allowing it to settle to the ground, building dunes along the shore.
Sea oats once covered the coastline from southern Florida to North Carolina. But after decades of coastal development and increasing human use of the beach, that blanket of grass has become tattered and patchy in many areas. As a result, coastal communities have faced a growing threat from beach erosion. That threat is never worse than during a hurricane, which can strip away dozens of yards of shoreline literally overnight.
Kane began working with sea oats in the early 1990’s, after Hurricane Andrew and other storms created an increased demand for the plant. Storm-damaged communities began multi-million-dollar projects to move sand back onto vanished beaches — and many hoped to protect their investment by planting sea oats on newly-formed dunes.
At the time, nurseries grew sea oats only from seed. And on many beach restoration projects, the nurseries were required to collect their seed only from oats on or near the beach being restored. Environmental officials suspected that there might be subtle differences between sea oats growing in different locations. Transplanting oats from one beach to another, they believed, might upset the environmental balance on the dunes.
In the areas hardest hit by the hurricanes, there weren’t many sea oats left, making it difficult to collect enough seed to restore the hardest-hit beaches. Kane hoped to speed up the process by cloning the plants.
“Seed production put a bottleneck on the commercial sector’s ability to supply sea oats, and this seemed to be a good way to work around that,” Kane said.
Kane began collecting samples of sea oats from beaches around the state and found that there are indeed significant genetic differences between plants from different parts of the coast. Those genetic differences could be linked to traits that allow the plants to adapt to conditions specific to their location, Kane said.
“As it turns out, there is more variation in this plant than we knew,” he said. “Along the coast environmental conditions can vary quite a bit from one location to another, and each variety may be adapted to its microclimate.”
But those adaptations don’t necessarily mean that sea oats shouldn’t be transplanted from one beach to another. Kane hopes to catalogue and test plants from around the state, looking for genotypes that are particularly fit for use in beach restoration projects — oats that put out particularly strong roots, for instance, or are particularly resilient in poor environmental conditions.
“We’re not going to put out a single clone that becomes the standard for every restoration project,” he said. “But we’re assembling a library of samples that can allow us to select the best fit for a given area.”
Kane has put some sea oat genotypes to the test, growing them on four coastal locations around the state in multi-year field trials that ended this summer, just before the first of this year’s four landfalling hurricanes. He said he is still analyzing the results from those trials, but he’s already getting calls from government officials and property owners looking for plants to use in beach restoration projects.
“Sea oats are in big demand, and that demand is going to grow,” he said. “It’s too early to say which beaches have the worst damage or how much funding there will be for renourishment projects, but there are very few parts of the coastline that weren’t affected in some way this year.”
Sea oat grower Otto Bundy, Sr. said Kane is doing crucial research that most commercial growers can’t afford to do.
“None of us would ever get started on a project like this if we had to spend thousands of dollars of our own money on research and development,” said Bundy, founder of Horticultural Systems Inc., a nursery based in Parrish, Fla.
Kane said a sea oat shortage is much less likely this time around, largely because some commercial growers have adopted cloning as a way to mass-produce a wide variety of sea oat types.
While Kane clones plants primarily for research purposes, he prides himself on running a “full-service” lab, able to provide plants for beach restoration projects. Roughly 1,200 plants from his lab were among the 47,000 sea oats planted by UF extension agents and local volunteers in a beach restoration in Fernandina Beach.
Once plants are available, volunteers aren’t hard to find, said Maia McGuire, the IFAS/Sea Grant Extension agent who led the planting effort.
“People understand that when they’re putting these plants in, they’re protecting their own property from storm damage,” she said.
-30-
0
