Ghost Forests are growing as sea levels rise » Yale's climate connection

Like giant bones planted on Earth, clusters of tree trunks appear along the Chesapeake Bay on the Mid-Atlantic coast of the United States. They are ghost forests: once the trouble of cedar and pine forests. Since the late 19th century, these trees have expanded and died along the shore. They won't grow.

These tree cemeteries appear where the land is gently tilted to the ocean and salt water increasingly invades. On the East Coast of the United States, in pockets on the West Coast and elsewhere, the salt-salted soil kills hundreds of thousands of acres of trees, leaving behind wooden bones that are usually surrounded by swamps.

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What will happen next? it depends. As these dead forests transition, some will become swamps that maintain important ecosystem services, such as preventing storms and storing carbon. Others may become home to invasive plants, or have no life that supports plants at all – ecosystem services will be lost. Researchers are working to understand how this increasingly shift to swamps and ghost forests will affect coastal ecosystems.

Many ghost forests are the result of sea level rise, said Keryn Gedan, a coastal ecologist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., co-author of the article on salts in coastal ecosystems in the 2025 Marine Science Annual Review. Rising sea levels can bring about a more intense storm surge, causing salt water to flood the top of the soil. Aridity and sea level rise can transfer groundwater tables along the coast, allowing saltwater to travel further inland under forest floors. Salt accumulation, depriving freshwater trees of trees are under pressure.

The transition from a living forest to a swamp is not necessarily a tragedy, Gaidan said. Swamps are also an important feature of coastal ecosystems. Marcelo Ardón, an ecosystem ecologist and biogeochemist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, said the transition from sea levels to the past has taken place from forest to swamps.

“You think of these forests and swamps dancing on and below the coast,” he said.

The swamp provides many ecosystem benefits. They are habitats for birds and crustaceans such as salt marshes, swamps, crabs and mussels. They are also a niche of locally resistant plants containing salt salts, such as rush and certain grasses, providing food and shelter for animals.

The swamp can also store large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere. Plants absorb carbon dioxide during photosynthesis, while muddy sediments capture other carbon sources, such as dead leaves and small organisms. For example, along the coastal rivers in southern Georgia, salty and salt marshes have more carbon than the tidal forests they replace.

The salt marsh also buffers the inland ecosystem from storms at sea, bearing the brunt of ground storms and storms, protecting trees outside. Recent research shows that wide swamps help prevent more ghost forests by preventing some salt water from sweeping into the forest.

However, not all salt marshes can replace the forest's ability to suck carbon. Ardón has been studying the forests of the Albermar-Pamelo Peninsula in North Carolina. He found that these forests had a mixture of rugged cypress, Atlantic white cedar, and deciduous hardwood, which had more carbon stored than the wetlands that began to exceed theirs.

As trees die, swamps do not always develop. When the forest is submerged too quickly, mud develops, and services of trees and swamps are lost. Sometimes, invasive plant species move before native swamp plants are raised.

“When many forests die, instead of being replaced by local salt marshes… it's actually a dwarf red mud,” said Forest ecologist Stephanie Stotts. article. A dwarf The subspecies are invasive reeds that quickly take over wetland habitat. Stotz said native animals are not suitable for eating this phrase, so the popularity of reeds may affect other organisms.

Many ghost forests are expanding. Estimates show that since 1985, 11% of forests in the Crocodile River National Wildlife Refuge in the Albermaar-Pamelo Peninsula have been transformed into swamps. Since the mid-1800s, about 150 square miles of forest around the Chesapeake Bay area have transitioned. Gaidon said the only way to slow down the trend is to hit sea level rise and climate change.

It is unclear how these coastal transitions will work and whether they will give way to healthy swamps as the trees surrender. Stotz said it would take decades for trees to die, so the full impact of these forests becoming skeletons remains to be seen. “We are about 50 years behind.”

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