Sand dunes along the Alabama Gulf Coast are protected by law for a reason.

They are habitat to native species and endangered species in the area, such as the Alabama beach mouse and loggerhead sea turtle nestings. Likewise, Gulf Coast communities depend on coastal dunes to provide a natural storm barrier, if and when storm surges occur.

If you walked along the Alabama Gulf Coast in the past month, you probably found what looks like brown seaweed — you also probably found out it has a smell. The smelly clumps are called sargassums, which is a brown macroalgae that plays a vital part in coastal dune restoration.

According to an article from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), sargassum is a type of brown algae that travels from what's known as the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, which is composed of massive amounts of sargassum in the western North Atlantic. Most commonly, it travels to the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf and the tropical South Atlantic via wind and ocean currents.

"People think that it's like the bad sister or the bad brother of seaweed, but it's really not," said Gilbert Gonzalez, facility manager of Orange Beach Coastal Resources. "It's actually a very good thing to get in our beaches."

As previously reported by GCM, Coastal Resources uses machinery such as tractors to relocate the sargassum.

"When the city does collect the sargassum, the city utilizes tractors to drop the sargassum off at the base of the primary dune and then add sand on top of it to help with decomposition," Nicole Woerner, deputy director of Coastal Resources, stated in the article. "Sargassum is a natural solution for dune restoration, and this method will fertilize and nourish the dune vegetation which promotes dune growth."

For example, the nutrients from sargassum can benefit dune plants such as sea oats, one of the most common plants that grow in Alabama's coastal dunes. Sea oats are wheat-like plants, "which have stems that trap the sand grains blown off the beach while growing upward to keep pace with sand burial," according to an article from the National Park Service.

Though sargassum has its environmental benefits, blooms can be harmful for "sensitive populations," Woerner said in a recent GCM article.

Sargassum inundation events, which is when large amounts of the algae are pushed ashore by winds and current and decompose, producing a sulfurous smell, which can be harmful to breathe in, according to the NOAAN article. Tropical Storm Arthur brought stormy weather to the Gulf. But according to Gonzalez, they didn't see an increase in the level of sargassum washing ashore after the storm.

"The last couple weeks it was pretty high. We're getting about two to three feet of sargassum," Gonzalez said.

He noted that they had been raking and relocating the sargassum "almost every day."

While he said they schedule the cleanups around the environment, they groom and clean the 10-mile stretch from Gulf State Park to the Florida-Alabama state line, at least from Wednesday to Friday.