Plants that grow on California’s beaches are surprisingly hard to detect with traditional remote sensing methods. Plants are small and patchy (< 1 meter wide). A beach typically has a dozen or so different plant species. They are usually silvery in color (highly reflective), not green, and if they are green, they’re sticky so they are covered in sand. It’s difficult to distinguish small, sand colored plant pixels from actual sand. To make matters worse, the sand they live on shifts daily so the physical structure of their habitat is not stable or the same from day to day. This means your imagery needs to be from the same day as your elevation data or nothing will match up topographically. What’s a dune researcher to do? In this talk, I’ll explore some avenues for working with this difficult ecosystem. I will try to not only tell the plants from the sand, but tell the plants apart from each other using aerial imagery and elevation data using R’s spatial packages.