Coastal Uplands

Coastal uplands contain a variety of plant communities and ecotones (transitions between communities)!

NPS / Katy Perrault

 

Coastal Uplands

While Cape Cod National Seashore, as with most Seashores, is well-known for its beaches, the coastal uplands and the interior forests and woodlands are a defining characteristic ecologically. Coastal uplands include everything from the beach inland to the dominant vegetation type, covering dunes, grasslands, heathlands, and coastal forests in the Seashore with multiple different communities and ecotones (transitions between communities), especially of plants.

Park scientists monitor two Vital Signs in coastal uplands: coastal forests and dune grassland vegetation. Data, reports, publications, and protocols are variable and will be updated when more is available to be shared.

 

Coastal Forests

 

Coastal forests are important to understanding the ecological status of Cape Cod National Seashore and the Cape as a whole! Images like this are taken at monitoring sites that allow park scientists to estimate canopy cover and understand more about forest status.

NPS / Steve Smith

The areas these forests occupy have gone through a lot of change - from pine-oak forests before European settlement to heathlands and grasslands during the 18th and 19th centuries to the re-invasion of trees after the mid-1800's. Dominated by mixtures of pitch pine, black oak, and white oak broken up by smaller areas of red maple, beech, and black locusts that each have different ecological needs and benefits, Cape Cod National Seashore's coastal forests are mosaics of species influenced by cultural and natural resources.

Forest communities are found throughout the Seashore in a range of topographic, hydrologic, and geologic conditions, providing habitat for a large range of species of flora and fauna. They are influenced by natural and anthropogenic faactors, including fire (or fire supression), disease, precipitation, invasive species, insects, succession, changing temperatures, radiation, and air pollution, and serve as important ecological indicators. Monitoring of abiotic factors, such as air quality, can help to inform data from this monitoring program as well, all of which help park scientists to keep an eye on the health of Cape Cod National Seashore and make informed management decisions.

With some forest species being fire-adapted and some encouraged by fire suppresion, understanding and monitoring the status of coastal forests is important in planning fire management, for example. Coastal forest monitoring also helps park management to understand how to maintain cultural vistas, like Fort Hill, where preventing succession is important to maintaining the look and feel of the area for visitors in the same way as it appeared for the Pennimans in the 1860's - an interesting example of the interplay between cultural and natural resource management at a National Park!

The coastal forests monitoring program aims to document the spatial and temporal components of change within specific forest community types by providing data of forest structure, including understory vegetation, and relative species abundances (which species are where and how much of them are there, which tells scientists how rare they are in relation to other species around them). Understanding successional change, which is the natural pattern of ecosystem change (think going from close to nothing - agricultural land - to a full-blown forest with everything from tall trees to tiny grasses) is especially important.

How this is monitored:

• 39 sites representing 8 primary community types covering the geographic range of the Seashore are sampled every 10 years
  • Overstory vegetation (tall trees) are assessed for health and trunk diameter
  • The height of the tallest tree is estimated
  • Tree seedlings/saplings are counted
  • Estimates of near-ground (shrub) and ground (herbaceous) cover by species are made
  • Hemispheric digital images are taken and analyzed with imaging software to estimate canopy cover

 

Monitoring Documents
Coastal Forests

Here you can find monitoring documents for the Coastal Forests monitoring program at Cape Cod National Seashore!

Source: NPS DataStore Collection 9712. To search for additional information, visit the NPS DataStore.

 

Dune Grassland Vegetation

 

The vegetation of the dune grasslands is also monitored to learn more information about the plant community composition. Coastal dunes make up roughly a third of Cape Cod National Seashore, formed when sand from the beaches of the Province Lands was blown inland after the glacial retreat that gave rise to the Seashore as we know it. The glacial history of Cape Cod is also heavily tied to another monitoring program, monitoring of the kettle ponds. Removal of mature forest by European settlers for wood harvesting and agriculture gave rise to destabilization of the ground surface and a sparsely vegetated system of shifting dunes. Some of the smaller areas of dunes are older while others have been created and sustained by wind erosion of the bluffs, overwashes (when the sea washes over dunes that were serving as barriers), and sand accretion. Vegetation cover is also highly variable, ranging in succesional stage from grassland to shrub to pre-shrub. You can learn more about coastal geomorphology on the Coastal Shores monitoring page.

Some plant species are almost exclusively found in these dune habitats, such as sand jointweed and dune flatsedge, in addition to many lichens, mosses, mushrooms, and wildlife species. Endangered species, like the Eastern spadefoot toad, and rare species, like the Vesper sparrow, also rely on these ecosystems. Natural succession is rapidly changing these early successional, open landscapes, causing them to disappear as these species know it. The dunes, and their succesional stage, were altered by human interference when European settlers changed these forested areas to grassland, highlighting an interesting example of anthropogenic (human-caused) influence on landscapes and the impact on species as natural processes take over again.

In addition to species impacts, plant communties responding to natural and anthropogenic influences affect dune migration, which in turn has implications for predicting landscape-level change that may impact park management. Influences include changing weather patterns and temperatures, invasive species, precipitation patterns and quality, air quality, and anthropogenic disturbances. It's important for

How this is monitored:

Dune grassland vegetation long-term monitoring is in development and happens about every 5 years.

• Transects running perpendicular to the shoreline away from the coastal bluffs were established
• Two 100 square meter plots are surveyed at regular metered intervals from the starting point at the bluff
• Total plant cover per site for each species is estimated and total cover of soil algae, lichens, and mosses is also recorded

This data, in addition to precipitation and nitrogen and sulfate deposition data from the air quality monitoring program and aerial photography, allow park scientists to understand more about plant species composition in the dune grasslands. This monitoring allowed Seashore staff to understand that dune grassland vegetation is largely controlled by physical factors like erosion and precipitation. As both erosion and precipitation patterns are experiencing changes on a larger scale due to other atmospheric and ecological changes and human influence, this finding has interesting implications for these dune grasslands. Physical conditions different at different distances from the bluff, such as the amount of salt spray, introduce additional complexities. Through this monitoring, scientists have been able to learn that succession is evident in the dune grasslands, which is natural, but may impact species that rely on them and introduce other challenges that should be monitored. In addition, expected rates of sea level rise (in turn increasing marsh habitat) and erosion will lead to squeezing of this habitat from both sides. Monitoring dune grassland vegetation can help to inform not only potential impacts to rare species, but also management of park resources and infrastructure as dune structure may change with vegetation changes.

 

Monitoring Documents
Dune Grassland Vegetation

Here you can find the monitoring documents available for dune grassland vegetation.

Source: NPS DataStore Collection 9713. To search for additional information, visit the NPS DataStore.

 

Written by Science Communication Scientist-in-Parks Katy Perrault