The influence of dune pavilions on longer term dune development

The European beach-dune systems are under increasing pressure due to urbanization, beach tourism and the effects of climate change like rising sea level and increased storm intensity. Building with nature solutions (Stive et al., 2013) are advocated as an effective and adaptable approach to protect sandy coasts in the future. This approach however interacts with the increased human use of the beaches- which can have an adverse impact on the efficiency of the building with nature approach. Especially permanent structures influence the natural sand transport dynamics from the beach to the dunes and can have long lasting effects on dune development.

To obtain more insight into the influence of buildings on longer term dune development a 3-months ‘Scanex 2020’ field campaign was conducted (Poppema et al., 2021) on Noordwijk beach (52.24 °N, 4.42 °E) to monitor the natural sand development around two sea containers (see Figure 1). In addition on a larger scale the dune development around a permanent beach pavilion was monitored for two years (from August 2019 till August 2021) within the CoastScan project (Vos et al., 2017) with a permanent laser scanner.