Just like gigantic bones planted in the earth, clusters of Boombroek, stripped of Bark, appear along the Chesapeake Bay on the Middle Atlantic coast of the United States. They are ghost forests: the spooky remains of what were once of cedar and pines. Since the end of the 19th century, an ever -increasing part of these trees has died along the coast. And they will not grow back.
These tree utensils appear in places where the land gently ends in the ocean and where salt is increasingly penetrating. Along the east coast of the United States, in the pockets of the west coast, and elsewhere, saltier soils have killed hundreds of thousands of hectares of trees, making woody skeletons typically surrounded by swamp.
What happens afterwards? That depends on it. As these dead forests pass, some will be swamps that retain vital ecosystem services, such as buffering against storms and storing carbon. Others can become the home of invasive plants or do not support any plant life at all – and the ecosystem services will be lost. Researchers work on understanding how this growing shift to swamps and ghost forests per balance will affect, ecosystems of the coast.
Many of the ghost forests are a result of the rise in sea level, says the coast -ecologist Keryn Gedan of George Washington University in Washington, DC, co -author of an article about the sediment of coastal ecososystems in the annual assessment of Marine Science 2025. Rising sea level can. Drought and sea level rise can shift the groundwater table along the coast, allowing saltwater to travel further inland, under the forest floor. Trees, robbed of fresh water, are stressed when salt accumulates.
Yet the transition from living forest to swamp is not necessarily a tragedy, says Gedan. Marshes are also important characteristics of coastal ecosystems. And the shift from forest to swamp has happened during periods of the rise in sea level in the past, says Marcelo Ardón, an ecosystem ecologist and biogeochemist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.
“You would think of these forests and swamps that dance a little up and down the coast,” he says.
Marshes offer many ecosystem benefits. They are habitats for birds and shellfish, such as salt marshmussen, swamp wren's, crabs and mussels. They are also a niche for native salt tolerant plants, such as rushes and certain grasses that offer food and shelter for animals.
