Sea level rise drowning Eastern NC trees, leaving 'ghost forests,' reducing wildlife habitat

Many of you head to the coast during the summer months, and perhaps you have noticed a lot of dead trees as you get closer to the coast. Researchers at Duke University have now tied what they call these “ghost forests” to climate change.

More than 70 square miles of forest along the North Carolina coast has virtually disappeared when comparing what the coast used to look like in 1984.

A team of researchers at Duke has discovered that these forests are dying off due partially due to sea level rise. The trees simply can't survive in the salty waters. Emily Ury, a researcher at Duke, says that sea level rise combined with the development of land is “really squeezing out what is the last of this native habitat and creating a really big problem for the animals that live there because they have nowhere else to go.”

Researchers are particularly worried about the world's most endangered wolf – the red wolf – and the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker. But there is even more to be concerned about.

Ury says, “In addition to being a really excellent habitat to wildlife, these wetlands also store a tremendous amount of carbon in the living biomass, in the plants and in their soils below ground. So, losing these forests, particularly as they transition to salt marsh or what would be worse if they were to be lost to open water, it releases all of that carbon in that vegetation and in the soil back into the atmosphere. And that's what we are really concerned about, because this carbon dioxide being returned into the atmosphere contributes to climate change and basically just feeds back into this cycle.”

Where do we go from here? Ury says that North Carolina is a good test case to try out some new management techniques. The old way of doing wetland restoration where you try to replant the trees that were living there before isn’t really going to work in this new day and age because the baseline has shifted so far. Ury says, “We need to facilitate a transition to something that will thrive and provide some habitat benefits, even if it’s not the same ones that we had before, because that’s a better alternative than losing this land to open water.” She went on to say, “Maybe this could help other places, in states that aren’t quite so vulnerable and have a better chance of getting ahead of these problems.”

WRAL Documentary: Sea Change