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The Parks / Prince Edward Island / Greenwich

Greenwich Peninsula’s most significant and sensitive feature is the rare and relatively undisturbed parabolic dunes, which lie at the western end of the peninsula. A migrating dune system, moving in the direction of the forest at the rate of 2 - 4 metres per year, depending on wind and weather, it is trapped at its base by colonies of vegetation, leaving behind a series of counter-ridges called Gegenwalle, the only known example in North America. Continued overland dune migration has traversed forests, killing trees in its path and exposing woodland it had previously buried, creating an exhumed skeleton forest. Greenwich dunes provide one of the best examples on the continent of slowly recovering exhumed forestland. The association of sand dune grasses and sedges, marsh rushes, weeds and forest understory species, in the dune slack area where glacial till is exposed, does not occur elsewhere.