Volunteers plan to restore ‘defender of the dunes’ on AMI. How you can help
Nonprofit Keep Manatee Beautiful is planning a historic planting of sea oats, which anchor sand dunes that protect shorelines from erosion, flooding and storm surge.
Roughly 300 volunteers are signed up to plant a record 12,000 sea oats Saturday, starting at 7 a.m. on Anna Maria Island’s Coquina Beach. The group is still seeking more volunteers to help restore a critical part of the barrier island’s ecosystem.
Sea oats, also known as Uniola paniculata, is a tall, subtropical grass that is “commonly associated with the upper dunes along beach fronts,” according to the United States Department of Agriculture.
“They are the natural habitat for the marine ecosystem,” Keep Manatee Beautiful Executive Director Jennifer Hoffman said. “So birds use them to lay their eggs in. We have rodents and insects that use them as a food source and a living area. We have our turtles that lay their nests in them and use the dunes to protect their eggs before they hatch.”
Sea oats have a root system growing as much as 40 feet deep, according to the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.
“Because of that natural root system, they hold the sands in place,” Hoffman said. “Now, obviously, if the water is strong enough, the water moves the sands and everything with it away. And that’s what happened with our back-to-back hurricanes. That being said, we had several hurricanes prior to that (that) did not move the dunes. They did exactly what they were supposed to do.”
‘Defender of the dunes’
Hoffman added, “Sea oats are the natural defender of the dunes.”
In 2024, three hurricanes — Debbie, Helene and Milton — impacted Manatee County with catastrophic damage from August to October. Powerful storm surge from those hurricanes flattened sand dunes along the coast of Anna Maria Island and ruined large swaths of the area’s protective sea oats.
To help the island bounce back from that destruction, Keep Manatee Beautiful is planting a record 12,000 sea oats on Saturday.
“The Corps. Of Engineers in the county are actively working on getting the dune systems redone,” Hoffman said. “And it’s going to take a good year, year and a half for that project to be complete. And we did not want to go through, essentially, two storm seasons with nothing there.”
Keep Manatee Beautiful has planted 1,000 sea oats yearly for the past four years.
Hoffman said they purchased the sea oats, which have a two-inch plug root base and are about four feet tall, from a grower that collected seeds from the beach before the 2024 hurricanes.
“The most exciting part of this project is I am able to offer to individuals who live here and care about here, a way that they can give back and actually be a part of restoring the dunes,” Hoffman said. “So they get to come out, they get to plant a few plants into the dunes. Each person will have anywhere from 50 to 100 plants to plant on their own. And then they can come back year after year, and they can point to their friends and their family and their grandkids, ‘I built that dune. I’m the reason that this is helping and sustaining our beaches in perpetuity.’”
Volunteers can begin meeting Saturday at 6:15 a.m. at Coquina Beach’s Gulf side parking lot. The event starts at 7 a.m. and lasts five hours.
For more information, visit www.KeepManateeBeautiful.com/volunteer or the Eventbrite.
If you go
When: Saturday, July 26, at 7 a.m.
Where: Coquina Beach, Gulf side parking lot
What: Sea oat planting. Tools and planting materials are provided. Volunteers are encouraged to bring water, sunscreen, gloves and closed-toe shoes.
