Tiny, but mighty.

That’s an apt description for many of the species of native plants that start out small — when planted on beach dunes — but grow to provide a critical barrier protecting beaches from everyday erosion and from storm surge during hurricanes.

While beachgoers along the Paradise Coast may take those dunes and the plants that grow on them for granted, Naples Botanical Garden is hoping that tourists and residents alike will learn to value the importance of “nature’s shoreline barricades,” since beaches are a major economic driver for the region.

The Garden is part of a Collier County project to restore 13 miles of coastline with a million plants to help rebuild the dunes that have been decimated by major storms, including Irma, Ian, Idalia and Milton, over the past few years.

Since fall, more than 400,000 have already been planted, according to the Garden, in hopes that the resilient native plants will help strengthen the dunes and help beaches — a primary attraction for the tourism industry that contributes more than $3 billion in economic impact in Collier County each year — rebound more quickly after storms.

Developing plant diversity

Working with researchers at The Water School at Florida Gulf Coast University, conservationists at the Garden have been studying for several years how beach dunes dissipate wind and wave energy to help lessen the effects of storms on the coastline and communities.

Simultaneously, the Garden, with support from Collier Community Foundation, has been working with local plant nurseries to cultivate and grow native plants that can help make dunes more resilient.

Chad Washburn, vice president of conservation at the Garden, said the goal in using a diverse range of native plants is to restore an entire ecosystem that will help capture and retain sand, survive and rebound after storms and also provide habitat for wildlife.

Washburn, who called beach dunes “our first line of defense against hurricanes,” said that after Collier County invested in emergency berms and beach renourishment projects after Hurricane Ian, the Garden offered to be part of an effort to help maintain and restore other dunes.

“We kept saying, ‘Plants are so vital to holding that sand in place. We’ve [the County] invested a lot of money in that berm and we want to ensure that we can hold it in place,’” Washburn recalled.

He said the Garden and other community stakeholders worked together on a “recipe for beach dune restoration, for truly restoring the ecosystem” based on the data that had been collected over the years on the beach dunes and how dynamic they are.

“We put those protocols together and those were included in the county’s restoration plan, and that has been how we’ve moved forward with the restoration,” Washburn said. “This was really a great opportunity, this partnership between university [FGCU] research, the Garden’s applied research and the City of Naples and Collier County to work together to improve how we restore our beaches. We’re confident that this will help trap and hold sand in place and save money. By stabilizing sand, we should be able to lengthen the time between when we need to renourish our beaches, and help save funds.”

‘The power of plants’

When it comes to helping build and stabilize beach dunes, each plant has a different function, according to Jeannine Richards, assistant professor of restoration ecology at FGCU’s Water School.

“Some are really good for spreading out over the dune and holding sand in place and trapping sand, while some have really large root structures that make them better at withstanding a storm surge event,” Richards said. “They all have their own benefits and structures.”

One function of dune plants during a surge event is to help reduce the force of wind and waves.

“As the wave passes over, if there’s an over-wash of the dune, that surge strength is diminished by having vegetation there; the plant structure is slowing down the water,” Richards said. “The other function is in the recovery and rebuilding after a storm event. Some of the plants are able to come back really successfully from their roots, even after being buried deeply in sand or completely killed above ground. They still have life left in their roots and can come back quickly after a storm and start performing some of those functions again.”

She said there has been a resurgent interest in “nature-based solutions,” such as the use of native plants to help restore and strengthen the coastline.

“Given the damage that we’ve sustained from some of the recent storm events, we realize something has to change, but we don’t really want to put in hard infrastructure like seawalls or other engineered solutions,” Richards said. “If we can do a lot of that work using the power of plants to help protect the dunes, it allows us to maintain the aesthetics of our beaches to a great extent.”

Public-private partnerships help cultivate and grow

Washburn said that while Garden staff collects seeds and cuttings of native plants in the wild — supported by a $325,000 grant from the Collier Community Foundation — there is not enough plant material to restore the dune ecosystems with native, locally collected plants from a wide range of plant diversity.

He said the Garden works with Rookery Bay Estuarine Research Reserve and several other partners to identify the important plants and collect small numbers of seeds or cuttings from them.

“We bring those back to an offsite facility and turn a hundred seedlings into tens of thousands of cuttings or seeds,” he said. “Then we have a public-private partnership with the nurseries [including American Farms in Naples] where we provide cuttings or seeds, and they can grow the plants.”

‘One of the biggest issues’

Supporting the plant project is part of the Collier Community Foundation’s commitment to the environment, according to Eileen Connolly-Keesler, president and CEO. This effort was identified as one of the top three priorities in the community assessment conducted in 2022-23.

“That almost doubled [from the previous assessment] as far as the number of people who believe that the environment is one of the biggest issues that we have to work on here in Collier County,” Connolly-Keesler said. “A lot of it has to do with resilience and mitigation when these storms hit us, and this was a really unique project coming out of the Garden.

“It made a lot of sense for us to participate and to see if their concept could have an impact on coastal resilience, which obviously it has.”

Collier County contracted with Fort Myers-based EarthBalance on the dune plantings and on placing “Please Keep Off Dunes” signs to protect the fragile ecosystems as they get established.

Beachgoers can help protect dunes

Those signs are designed to remind beachgoers how important it is to give the dunes a chance to recover and expand, Washburn said.

“It’s vital that the plants we’re planting are protected — they are not just there for beauty, they are there for function,” he said. “And if we have a lot of people walking on the plants, they don’t survive, and then we get erosion. So, not walking on the beach dune plants, not putting your beach chair on the beach dune plants, these are important in treating dunes like protected ecosystems.”

This story was published in The Naples Press on May 2.