TUESDAY, JUNE 7 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ EE E5
As sea levels rise, droughts
deepen and storms become more
intense, saltier water makes its
way into these woodlands more
readily from surrounding water
bodies, as well as deeper into the
sprawling network of drainage
ditches and irrigation canals
c reated long ago to support the
expansion of agriculture.
Persistently wet conditions can
weaken existing trees. And epi-
sodes of saltwater intrusion can
push already stressed forests to
the breaking point, poisoning the
freshwater on which they depend
and hastening the death of trees
not only at the water’s edge but
also far inland in some cases. The
result are expanses of dead or
dying trees, known as “snags,”
that stand as grim monuments to
a shifting ecosystem.
“This has happened over and
over before in geologic time,” says
Marcelo Ardón, an ecologist at
North Carolina State University.
“But now it is happening faster.”
Ghost forests have existed for
decades. But as they proliferate,
scientists are racing to better
understand the factors driving
the changes, what humans might
do to slow the demise of such
forests and what consequences
lie ahead if the trend continues.
They are investigating what
the profound changes to coastal
systems might mean for the mi-
grating birds, mammals, reptiles
and plants that call them home.
And they worry about what
will come of the massive stores of
carbon these landscapes hold,
huge amounts of which could be
released back into the atmos-
phere as forests die and the land
retreats — a shift that could fur-
ther complicate efforts to slow
the warming of the planet.
“I still feel like we are just
scratching the surface and trying
to figure out how much of an
impact this is,” Ardón says, “and
how big of an area is being affect-
ed.”
‘Something’s not right’
Emily Ury was haunted by
what she saw when she began to
travel the coastal stretches of
North Carolina, where in certain
spots the ashen skeletons of trees
spread as far as she could see.
“You just know looking at it
that something’s not right,” says
Ury, who at the time was a doctor-
al student at Duke University,
studying the ecology of wetlands.
“The most fundamental ques-
tions haven’t been answered.
Where is this happening? Why is
this happening? To what extent is
it happening?”
To help answer that last ques-
tion, Ury and other researchers
turned to Google Earth, where
they examined visible changes
over the past 35 years to the
Alligator River National Wildlife
Refuge.
In a paper published last year,
they found that, despite its pro-
tected status, nearly a third of the
refuge — or more than 47,000
acres — had transformed from
forest habitat to shrub land or
marsh over that period. Nearly
3,000 more acres were “lost to the
sea.” And as much as 11 percent of
the refuge became ghost forest,
dominated by dead trees and
fallen trunks.
While the greatest forest losses
occurred where the refuge met
the Croatan and Pamlico sounds,
the researchers say, tree deaths
“also occurred much further in-
land in low-elevation areas and
alongside major canals.”
Specific events have clearly
played a role. For instance, re-
searchers observed a spike in
deaths after Hurricane Irene in
2011 forced enormous amounts of
salty water into forests already
strained by years of drought. But
the problem continued in the
years that followed.
In their findings, Ury and her
colleagues saw a glimpse of what
lies ahead for areas beyond this
corner of North Carolina, where
sea levels have risen roughly a
foot over the past century. The
eerie phenomenon has unfolded
along the Atlantic seaboard, from
the swamps of Louisiana to the
Chesapeake Bay, from the white
cedar forests of New Jersey to the
St. Lawrence estuary in Canada.
“These unprecedented rates of
deforestation and land cover
change due to climate change
may become the status quo for
coastal regions worldwide,” they
wrote, “with implications for wet-
land function, wildlife habitat,
and global carbon cycling.”
Ury says she knows that many
people might not grasp the long-
term threats posed by their trans-
formation, even as the sight of
stricken trees is difficult to miss.
Saltwater intrusion has inflicted
damage in more immediate and
visceral ways, such as contami-
nating aquifers and tainting once
fertile farm land in the region.
But even less obvious changes
are significant.
“People just don’t really care
about swamp forests. They are
not really populated,” says Ury,
now a postdoctoral fellow at the
University of Waterloo in Ontar-
io. “But they are experiencing this
FORESTS FROM E1
massive shift, and it’s a loss of an
ecosystem that’s underappreciat-
ed but still has a lot of value for
water quality and wildlife habitat
and storing carbon.”
“And it’s definitely a canary in
the coal mine for coastal change,”
she says.Bad math
On a sun-splashed spring
morning, Ardón stands knee deep
in the cold water of the Albemarle
Sound.
“It’s happening right here,” he
says of climate change. He nods
toward the stumps of fallen trees
poking out of the water, some of
them 50 feet or more from the
shoreline. “That was probably
land 20 years ago.”
After a short hike inland, Ar-
dón reaches one of many testingsites he and colleagues maintain
inside the Palmetto-Peartree Pre-
serve. Year after year, they track
whether the soil is accumulating
or subsiding.
In this spot, as in others, the
forest floor is adding mass a
millimeter at a time, but at a
much slower pace than the local
rate of sea level rise.
“Bad math,” Ardón calls it.
“Over time, these forests are go-
ing to get swallowed by the
sound.”
Scientists say that transition
from forested wetlands to marsh
and eventually to open water
raises daunting questions about
what will happen to the habitat
for a range of species, including
red-cockaded woodpeckers and
many other birds, black bears,
river otters and critically endan-gered red wolves.
It also has serious implications
for climate change.
Researchers have found that
an estimated 27 million tons of
carbon are stored in the trees and
other biomass along the
A lbemarle-Pamlico Peninsula.
A 2020 study detailed how
ghost forests had crept across
roughly 15 percent of the area’s
unmanaged public land from
2001 to 2014. During that time,
the authors calculated, the
changes allowed an estimated
130,000 tons of carbon to escape
into the atmosphere that other-
wise would have remained se-
questered. Those emissions fur-
ther fuel the planet’s warming
and make it harder to avoid fu-
ture disasters.
A separate study last yearfound that the “amount of carbon
lost from forest mortality is far
greater than that gained by the
growing marsh soils.” The time it
would take for wetlands to make
up for the carbon-related impact
of dying trees, the authors wrote,
“is at the scale of centuries, which
is approximately the same
amount of time predicted for
marshes to drown from rising sea
levels.”
In other words, more evidence
of bad math.
“If you were to lose this forest
and all this carbon above ground,
how long would it take for the
marsh to recover the carbon that
is lost? It’s on the order of 200 to
600 years,” Ardón says.
Neither marshes nor humans
have that kind of time to stave off
climate change, he says, as hesurveyed the forest and the creep-
ing shoreline beyond.
“In that time, this is going to be
underwater.”Trying to slow the inevitable
Researchers from Florida to
New Jersey and from Louisiana to
Maryland are busy trying to learn
more about the causes and conse-
quences of ghost forests — from
their impact on wildlife and wa-
ter quality to whether dead trees
emit greenhouse gases through
their strawlike trunks.
Meanwhile, state and federal
wildlife officials, along with
groups such as the Nature Con-
servancy, are trying to slow down
the rapid transition, even as they
know the land probably will nev-
er be what it once was.
In North Carolina, that has
meant an array of efforts such as
sowing oyster reefs to combat
erosion, planting more saltwater-
tolerant plants and trees, and
engineering specialized ditch-
draining structures meant to pre-
vent saltwater from penetrating
deep into the forests and vegeta-
tion that remain.
“If we do nothing, the forest
could collapse rapidly and go
from being forested to being open
water,” says Brian Boutin, direc-
tor of the Albemarle-Pamlico
Sounds Program at the Nature
Conservancy. “We’re buying time
to allow it to transition to some-
thing that’s still going to be func-
tional and still provide habitat for
a wide variety of species.”
But the future is perilous for
this landscape and others like it,
as researchers wrote in one study
last summer: “At the current rate
of deforestation, in the absence of
widespread protection or restora-
tion efforts, coastal forested wet-
lands may not persist into the
next century.”
Emily Bernhardt, a Duke ecolo-
gist and professor and co-author
of that study and others on ghost
forests, says even as scientists
continue to study the problem,
they must help policymakers,
farmers and other residents con-
sider how to make the best out of
the decades to come.
Scientists have documented
the changes that have already
happened and those that are like-
ly to come. “The question is, can
we go there in an intelligent,
intentional way that’s protective
of livelihoods and biodiversity?
Or are we going to go there in a
very catastrophic way?”
They are questions Lanier pon-
ders often as he nears the home
stretch of his career.
As the manager of the Alligator
River National Wildlife Refuge,
the vast majority of which lies
barely two feet above sea level, he
knows the person in his job could
face “a very different thing” in
only a handful of decades. If
current trends continue, he said,
the majority of the refuge could
be underwater within a century.
“It’s sobering to see a land-
scape you are trying to manage
for wildlife die out,” he said.
But Lanier and others who care
about this place are not content to
sit idle. There is wildlife that
depends on this habitat, humans
who rely on its water filtration
benefits and a planet that relies in
part on its ability to store carbon.
“We’re trying to find out what
we can do to make sure the place
is as resilient as we can,” he says.
“To try to slow down the change
as long as it’s possible.”PHOTOS BY CAROLYN VAN HOUTEN/THE WASHINGTON POSTTOP: Ghost forests are found throughout the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. LEFT: Scott Lanier, manager of the refuge.
RIGHT: Marcelo Ardón, left, and Peter Lazaro study changes to the ghost forest in the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge.As ghost forests spread, scientistsrace to better understand themDead trees that were swamped by the Albemarle Sound in the Palmetto-Peartree Preserve. As sea levels rise, droughts deepen and
storms become more intense, saltier water makes its way into these woodlands more readily from surrounding water bodies.