For years, Emily Ury traversed North Carolina’s coastal roads, studying patches of skeletal trees slain by rising seas that scientists call

Why Ecologists Are Haunted by the Rapid Growth of Ghost Forests

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2021-05-26 12:30:05

For years, Emily Ury traversed North Carolina’s coastal roads, studying patches of skeletal trees slain by rising seas that scientists call "ghost forests." Killed by intruding saltwater along the Atlantic Coast, they are previews of the dire fate other forests face worldwide.

Ury knew that ghost forests were expanding in the region, but only when she began looking down from above using Google Earth did she realize how extensive they were.

“I found so many dead forests,” says Ury, an ecologist at Duke University and co-author of a paper on the rapid deforestation of the North Carolina coast published last month in the journal Ecological Applications. “They were everywhere.”

As the ocean intrudes and saltwater rises, it kills trees and creates these ghost forests—bare trunks, and stumps, ashen tombstones marking a once-thriving coastal ecosystem. In North Carolina, pine, red maple, sweetgum and bald cypress forests are being replaced by saltmarsh. Eventually, that saltmarsh will be replaced by open water, a shift that leads to significant and complex costs to the environment and the local economy. The loss of forests will reduce carbon storage, further fueling climate change, and the agriculture industry, timber interests will suffer as saltwater moves inland.

To look at the extent of the spread of ghosts forests, Ury turned from Google Earth, which provides only a few years of data, to satellite images taken from 430 miles above the Earth going back more than thirty years. Her team created an algorithm that searched thousands of images for changes in forest coverage focusing on the Alligator National Wildlife Refuge on the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula, an area of 152,000 acres untouched by logging or development.

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