Scientific Mapping Project Shows East Coast Ghost Forests - Killed By Rising Seas - Are Far Larger Than Thought
EDIT
As sea levels rise, droughts grow more prolonged and storms become more intense, saltier water has increasingly made its way into these coastal woodlands from surrounding water bodies. It’s also finding its way into places farther inland, often along drainage ditches and agricultural irrigation canals built long ago. In some places, forests that once teemed with maple, sweet gum, bald cypress and stately pines have given way to shrubland. Some have already begun to surrender entirely to the advance of saltwater and flooding.
It is a phenomenon that has been increasingly studied by scientists in recent years, who have documented the existence of ghost forests in places throughout the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Even though their mere presence is not new, researchers have raced to better understand the processes that are hastening the death of such forests, what the changes mean for wildlife and plants, and the potential consequences should huge stores of carbon that lie beneath these landscapes get released back into the atmosphere.
The recent work by a team at the University of Virginia, along with colleagues at several other institutions, including Duke University, used a novel approach to show in a comprehensive way how the spread of ghost forests is likely to be more extensive than previously known.
The group used high-resolution aerial imagery, coupled with a computer model designed to spot the attributes of tree mortality, to identify 11,895,443 dead trees across coastal forests in 11 states. Their research was published in December in the journal Nature Sustainability. The innovative approach “provides a much more detailed view of the status of coastal forests,” said Marcelo Ardón, an ecologist at North Carolina State University who was not involved in the study but who also has done in-depth research on the complex changes unfolding in coastal forests.
EDIT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2026/01/30/ghost-forest-dead-trees-maps/
https://wapo.st/49PxN9t