Over the next 100 years, changing environmental conditions are predicted to raise sea levels, waves, and winds, making coastal sand dunes increasingly important as fragile but dynamic natural barriers against coastal storms, beach erosion, storm waves, surge, and flooding. Native coastal vegetation helps stabilize dunes by absorbing water, reducing runoff erosion, trapping windblown sand, buffering inland areas, limiting human access and foot traffic, and providing habitat for wildlife and plants. In Maine, dune restoration and protection are essential because winds, waves, tides, and currents continually reshape the beach environment. Along York's Long Sands Beach, people on horseback and in horse-drawn carriages used the top of the sand dune in the 1800s to reach the beach, hotels, and summer cottages, and the opening of the Portsmouth, Kittery, and York Electric Street Railway in 1898 placed trolley tracks and support structures on the frontal dune, beginning lasting changes there. In the late 1940s, Maine reconstructed the road now known as Long Beach Avenue, or State Route 1A, and included a 6100-foot sloped stone and concrete seawall from the Cutty Sark Motel to the mouth of the Little River to protect the improved road, sidewalk, utilities, private property, and the back dune and marsh area from storm damage and ocean flooding. In 2015, York built the new Long Sands Beach Bathhouse and moved Long Beach Avenue farther from the ocean, back to its pre-1940 alignment, and after storm damage to the sloped stone seawall in front of the bathhouse, the town added a concrete and granite step-shaped facing designed to absorb wave energy, reduce erosion along the wall, and support natural colonization of herbaceous dune vegetation north of the bathhouse.