Figure 1. 



Location of study area at 

 Cape Cod, Massachusetts. 



and easily attainable sand fencing material is the standard, slat snow fencing 

 normally used to prevent snow from drifting onto highways. This fencing is 

 made of wooden slats 3.8 centimeters wide and 1.2 meters long, bound in a paral- 

 lel series with steel wire. The fencing has a porosity of about 50 percent and 

 can be rolled up for ease in transporting. 



Beach grasses also create a region of low wind velocity. Most coastal dune 

 systems are naturally created and maintained by beach grasses which trap and 

 hold blowing sand. Planting of beach grass for sand stabilization originated 

 in the United States more than 150 years ago in Provincetown, Massachusetts, 

 about 40 kilometers north of the Nauset Beach experimental site (Fig. 1). The 

 most commonly used beach grass on the North Atlantic coast is American beach- 

 grass (Amnophila breviligulata) . This plant grows naturally from Maine to 

 North Carolina and in the Great Lakes region. 



b. Studies of Sand Fences and American Beachgrass . Coastal Engineering 

 Research Center (CERC) and its predecessor, the Beach Erosion Board (BEB) , 

 conducted sand stabilization experiments on the Outer Banks of North Carolina 

 during the 1960's (Savage, 1963; Savage and Woodhouse, 1968). These studies 

 documented considerable information on the relative effectiveness of American 

 beachgrass and sand fencing schemes. The results of those studies are presented 

 to provide a framework to assess the results of the Nauset Beach study. 



Savage (1963) tested the effectiveness of several fence configurations, 

 including (a) straight sand fence, (b) sand fence in a zigzag pattern, and 



