Like giant bones planted on Earth, masses of tree trunks with clean bark appear along the Chesapeake Bay on the Mid-Atlantic coast of the US. They are a ghost forest. It is an unforgettable ruin that once stood cedars and pine trees. From the second half of the 19th century, constantly wide strips of these trees have died along the coast. And they haven’t grown.
These tree cemeteries show up where the land is gently diagonal into the ocean, with salt water increasingly invading. Along the US East Coast, in the West Coast pockets, and elsewhere, salty soil kills hundreds of thousands of acres of trees, leaving behind a woody skeleton that is usually surrounded by wetlands.
What happens next? That’s different. As these dead forests move, some become swamps that maintain important ecosystem services, such as storm buffers and carbon storage. Others may become invasive plants homes or have no support for the plant’s lifespan at all, and ecosystem services are lost. Researchers are working to understand how this transition to growing swamps and haunted forests will balance and affect coastal ecosystems.
Much of the Ghost Forest is the result of rising sea levels, says Keringedan, a coastal ecologist at George Washington University in Washington, DC. Salinity of coastal ecosystems In the 2025 Annual Review of Marine Science. Sea level rise can result in more intense storm surges than flooding saltwater on top of the soil. Drought and sea level rise may allow groundwater tables to move along the coast The salt water travels inlandunder the forest floor. Trees that have been deprived of freshwater are emphasized as salt accumulates.
But the transition from living forests to swamps isn’t necessarily a tragedy, says Gedan. The swamps are also an important feature of coastal ecosystems. And Marcelo Aldon, an ecosystem ecologist and biogeochemist at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, says the transition from forest to wetlands has occurred during past periods of sea level rise.
“I think these forests and marsh are like dancing up and down the coast,” he says.
Wetlands offer many ecosystem benefits. They are habitat Birds and crustaceanssalt marsh sparrows, marsh lenses, crabs, mussels, etc. It is also a niche of native salt-resistant plants, such as rushes and specific grasses that provide food and shelter to animals.
