Like the giant bones planted in the Earth, the groups of tree tights, cleaned by bark, are visible on the mid-ninetutory coast of the United States with the CHESAPAL. They are ghost forests: once persecuted remains of cedar and pine stand. Since the late 19th century, these trees have died along a wide self -edge. And they will not move back.
These arborial cemeteries are visible in places where the ground slopes are slowly in the sea and where the salty water increases rapidly. Along with the eastern coast of the United States, in the pockets of the west coast, and in other places, salt soil has killed hundreds of thousands of acres of trees, usually overtaking wooden skeletons surrounded by marsh.
what happens next? that depends. As these dead forest infections infection, some marshes will be formed that maintain important ecosystems services, such as buffering and carbon against storms. Other people may become homes for aggressive plants or support life without a plant – and ecosystem services will be lost. Researchers are working to understand how this growing change towards swamp and ghost forests will affect the coastal ecosystem on balance.
Many forests of ghosts are a result of increase in sea levels, calling an article on an article of an article of coastal ecosies in the annual review of Kern Gedan, DC, 2025 Marine Science, coastal ecology at the University of George Washington in Washington. Increasing over the sea can bring more intense storms that may flood the salt water at the top of the soil. The increase in drought and sea level can transfer the groundwater table along the coast, allowing salt water to travel inland, below the forest bottom. Emphasis is laid as soon as the trees deprived of fresh water, salt are deposited.
Yet infection from living forest to Marsh is not necessarily a tragedy, Gedan says. Marsh also has important characteristics of coastal ecosystems. And during the increase in sea level in the past, there has been a change in the marsh to the marsh, saying that the ecology and biochemist of an ecosystem at the North Carolina State University in Rail, Marsello Ardon says.
“You will think of these forests and marshes, which dance together and below the coast,” they say.
Marsh provides many ecosystem benefits. They are accommodation for birds and crustaceans, such as salt marsh sparrows, marsh rains, crabs and muscles. They are also a niche for native salt-tolerant plants, such as crowds and some grasses, which provide food and shelter for animals.