The Presque Isle Peninsula is a compound barrier-spit system perched atop a recessional moraine along Lake Erie’s southeastern coast. Its distal terminus, Gull Point, has grown to an extent of around 0.6 km² since the early 1900s, promoted by beach nourishment along the peninsula proper and later influenced by a change in local hydrodynamic regime following breakwater installation near the attachment point. This coastal setting has set the stage for an analysis of ridge landform- and vegetation-succession dynamics using historical aerial images, a series of high-resolution LiDAR datasets, transect/quadrat surveys of vegetation, and increment core dates of tree cohorts on dune ridges separated by swales and lagoons. The general evolutionary model is one of punctuated landform growth to the east by lateral accretion, interspersed with erosional events and ridge recurving towards the backbarrier. Eastern cottonwood (Populus deltoides), with its minimally provisioned wind- and water-dispersed seeds, colonizes the margins of newly deposited sand ridges as discrete cohorts, and dominates the tree stratum of Gull Point. These cohorts are increasingly mature moving from distal to proximal zones, and consistently reflect the temporal sequence of ridge morphology. Vegetation communities, representing a primary successional chronosequence, are delineated into four phases extending back to the 1950s, which are roughly demarcated by erosional ridgelines of topographic prominence, revealing a tight coupling of lake-level trends, geomorphology, and vegetation dynamics. This provides coastal researchers with a means of understanding landform-age relationships across structurally complex strand areas for which age-relationships cannot be ascertained by aerial photographic records alone.

普雷斯克岛半岛是一个复合屏障-吐水系统，位于伊利湖东南海岸的一个衰退冰碛之上。自 1900 年代初以来，它的远端终点 Gull Point 已扩大到约 0.6 km ² ，受到沿半岛的海滩营养的推动，后来又受到在附着点附近安装防波堤后当地水动力状况变化的影响。这种沿海环境为使用历史航拍图像、一系列高分辨率 LiDAR 数据集、植被横断面/样方调查以及沙丘脊上树木群的增量核心日期分析山脊地貌和植被演替动态奠定了基础被洼地和泻湖隔开。一般的进化模型是一种不规则的地貌通过横向增生向东增长，穿插着侵蚀事件和向后屏障弯曲的山脊。东部三叶杨 ( Populus deltoides ) 以其最少供应的风散和水散种子，作为离散的群体在新沉积的沙脊边缘定居，并在 Gull Point 的树层中占主导地位。这些队列越来越成熟，从远端区域向近端区域移动，并一致地反映了脊形态的时间顺序。植被群落代表一个主要的演替时间序列，可追溯到 1950 年代，划分为四个阶段，由地形突出的侵蚀脊线粗略划分，揭示了湖泊水位趋势、地貌和植被动态的紧密耦合。这为沿海研究人员提供了一种理解结构复杂的海岸带区域的地形年龄关系的方法，这些区域的年龄关系无法仅通过航空摄影记录来确定。