Feedbacks between biotic and abiotic processes governing the development of foredune blowouts: a review

Abstract

This paper reviews the initiation, development, and closure of foredune blowouts with focus on biotic-abiotic interactions. There is a rich body of literature describing field measurements and model simulations in and around foredune blowouts. Despite this abundance of data there is no conceptual framework available linking biotic and abiotic observations to pathways of blowout development (e.g., erosional blowout growth or vegetation induced blowout closure). This review identifies morphological and ecological processes facilitating the transition between blowout development stages and sets them in the context of existing conceptual frameworks describing biotic-abiotic systems. By doing so we are able to develop a new conceptual model linking blowout development to the dominance of its governing processes. More specifically we link blowout initiation to the dominance of abiotic (physical) processes, blowout development to the dominance of biotic-abiotic (bio-geomorphological) processes and blowout closure to the dominance of biotic (ecological) processes. Subsequently we identify further steps to test the proposed conceptual model against existing observations and show possibilities to include it in numerical models able to predict blowout development for various abiotic and biotic conditions.