New Zealand's largest dune field
Manawatu’s 6000-year-old sand dune field has attracted great interest from geographers world-wide.
Part of an extensive dune field stretching 200 kilometres from Patea to Paekakariki, it measures 18 kilometres at its widest point. Apart from unstable dunes close to the coastline, the North Island dune field is a mix of well-established, parabolic dunes and large-scale sand sheets.
While it is widely believed that mature forest used to cover the older inland dunes and that swamp forest more than likely covered the depressions, the younger dunes are known to have been covered by coastal scrub kept pruned by wind and salt spray.
Unfortunately little of this coastal scrub has survived leaving it to successive councils to plant marram grass and more recently, the native Pingao and Spinifex, to stem ongoing erosion.
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