Sand nourishment is a widespread management strategy to protect sandy coasts against erosion. Nourishments can impact the benthic fauna directly by burial and indirectly by changing environmental conditions such as bottom shear stress and/or sediment composition (grain size distribution). The macrobenthic community in soft-bottom environments is often strongly correlated with sediment composition, however, because of the strong correlation with other environmental conditions, it is difficult to determine the direct effects of sediment composition on the macrobenthic community from field observations. Nourishments can temporarily break this correlation allowing to study the relation between sediment composition and macrobenthic community more or less independent from other environmental factors. In 2017, a shoreface nourishment was constructed at the Holland coast near Callantsoog at a water depth of about 10 m. Because the influence of waves is limited at this depth, the nourishment is not very mobile. Sediment composition and macrobenthos was monitored at the nourished site and two reference locations before (2015 and 2016), and in 2021, four years after nourishment. In 2021, the sediment composition at the nourished site was much coarser (median grain size 330 ± 59 μm) than in the years before nourishment (195 ± 34 μm), while the sediment composition at the reference locations remained comparable over the years. The average number of taxa per sample at the nourishment decreased from 14.1 before nourishment to 3.0 taxa in 2021. Also the average total density at the nourishment location decreased from 12731 ind.m⁻² before nourishment to 320 ind.m⁻² in 2021. While before nourishment, the composition of the macrobenthic community at the nourished site was comparable to the southern reference location, in 2021 the macrobenthic community was more comparable to the community at the coarser sediments of the northern reference. Clearly, four years after the nourishment, the macrobenthic community has not recovered due to the presence of coarser sediments at the nourished site. Logistic regressions show that most of the dominant species have a negative correlation with median grain size, but some species are more sensitive to changes in sediment composition than others. The sensitivity of the macrobenthos to sediment composition illustrates the importance of using sediments of similar grain size as in the placement area, especially for nourishments in the deeper parts of the shoreface.

Epifauna and infauna are often sampled by different types of sampling devices including grabs, and dredges, depending on various factors such as local environmental conditions, research questions and available budget. Because grabs and dredges have a different species-specific selectivity, both methods could be complementary but for some research questions they could give comparable results. In this study, a comparison is made between macrobenthos (epifauna and infauna) sampled simultaneously by a Van Veen grab and a quantitative benthic dredge, based on a large dataset that was collected from 2010 to 2019 as part of an extensive monitoring program to study the impact of the Sand Motor, a mega beach nourishment that was implemented in 2011 on the sandy North Sea coast in the Netherlands. Because of the larger mesh size of the sieve in the benthic dredge (5 mm) compared to the Van Veen (1 mm), only larger mollusks, echinoderms and crustaceans are identified in the dredge samples. This resulted in a lower number of taxa and average densities in the 676 benthic dredge samples (42 taxa and 98.7 ind. m⁻², respectively) compared to the 636 Van Veen samples (228 taxa and 1380.9 ind. m⁻², respectively). Due to the larger sampling area of the benthic dredge (10–15 m²) compared to the Van Veen (0.1 m²) the chance to encounter a species is higher in a benthic dredge than in a Van Veen grab sample. Although the benthic dredge only samples a subset of the benthic community that is sampled by the Van Veen grab, multivariate (nMDS) analysis of the data showed remarkable similarities between Van Veen and benthic dredge samples with major gradients correlated to water depth and temporal changes in environmental conditions due to the presence of the Sand Motor. This suggests that both techniques are indicative for the spatial variation and development of the macrobenthic community.

The Sand Motor is a very large (20 million m³) nourishment constructed along the coast in The Netherlands. The huge volume of sand is redistributed along the coast by natural forces stemming from tidal currents and waves. For environmental evaluation of this large construction, the benthic subtidal fauna has been sampled prior to the construction of the Sand Motor, and at 1, 2, 4, and 6 years after construction. Although some significant differences between years were detected, overall the total density, total biomass and average number of species per sample were surprisingly constant over this time period. However, large differences were found in the species accumulation curves over samples, and in the rank-biomass and rank-abundance plots. These were related to two important trends in the communities. First, the invasive mollusk Ensis leei, the biomass dominant in the years before construction of the Sand Motor, dwindled in importance in later years. Recruitment of the species failed, but it is unclear whether, and how, this is related to the construction of the Sand Motor. Second, the correlation structure between depth, grain size, bottom shear stress due to waves and currents, which is very tight along a linear coast, was disrupted by the Sand Motor. The community composition was shown to depend strongly on these physical factors. The nature of the dependencies did not change, but the range of different combinations of factors after construction of the Sand Motor was widely larger than before. Although samples had similar number of species per sample before and after construction, the average difference between samples after construction was much larger than before. The Sand Motor is a very large construction, leading to loss of a substantial area (order 100 ha) of submarine area, which recovers at a long time scale. Total disturbance of benthos by burial, expressed as area^∗(time before full recovery) was shown to be similar for the Sand Motor and for other coastal nourishment schemes when expressed per unit volume of sediment applied. However, in contrast to beach and shoreface nourishments, the Sand Motor led to a habitat diversification in the coastal zone.