While known to be threatened by a range of human impacts, sandy beaches are poorly studied relative to other marine habitats.
One potential solution to address the shortfall in environmental data on sandy beaches is to develop rapid assessment methods to provide measures that can predict the health of the ecosystem as a whole.
These include monitoring the abundance of indicator species whose abundance is assumed to correlate with known
ecosystem functions or decline with known threats.
Such methods have widely been used in other ecosystems, but have rarely been used in sandy beaches despite the fact they are some of the most vulnerable to threats from urbanisation.