Ghost Forests

"In central Europe... “You don’t have to look for dead trees,” says Henrik Hartmann, with Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry. “They’re everywhere.” In one recent year, following a week of excessive heat, hundreds of thousands of beech trees dropped their leaves. Bark beetles are also killing spruce, which is not unusual. But hotter weather weakens trees, making them more vulnerable and allowing the insects to multiply and survive through winter into the next year....“We’re approaching a situation where the forests cannot acclimate. There are individual species that are being driven beyond the threshold of what they can handle.”"

"Giant Sequoias, the Grand Daddy of the world’s trees are “dying from the top down.” This has never been documented before...“We’ve never observed this before.”...The loss of Giant Sequoias is but one example of a worrisome worldwide trend that’s nerve-racking. “Trees in forests are dying at increasingly high rates – especially the bigger, older trees.” 

“The baobab has been called the tree of life... and the upside down tree-- owing to its fat trunk with roots meandering toward the sky. But these strange looking giants are dying. Some of the oldest and biggest baobab trees in southern Africa have died recently, and it may be due to climate change... Of the oldest trees that we’ve looked at in Southern Africa, the three trees that are older than 2,000 years, in the last 10 years, they’ve all died. Of the 11 trees that are in that age 1,000 to 2,000 years, six of them have died”.

“In the early days of European settlement in New Jersey, abundant timber from the Atlantic white cedar was used for siding, shingles, fencing, furniture and a host of other items that played an important role in the state’s early economy.” More recently, damage has come from sea-level rise which has covered some of the tree’s salt-intolerant roots, creating increasingly familiar “ghost forests” — stands of dead white cedars in coastal areas. Away from the Shore, the tree’s ability to survive and regrow has also been hurt by increased flooding resulting from climate change and by an overabundant population of white-tailed deer which eat the cedar seedlings. The result is that New Jersey has only about 40,000 acres of Atlantic white cedar habitat left...a third of what was available to European settlers.” 

“As sea level rises, more and more saltwater encroaches on the land....The salty water slowly poisons living trees, leaving a haunted ghost forest of dead and dying timber. Still standing in or near brackish water, the decaying trees of a ghost forest resemble giant graying pillars that protrude into the air. Researchers report that the rapid increase in ghost forests represents a dramatic visual picture of environmental changes along coastal plains located at or near sea level. In many areas, rising sea levels combine with land sinking from the last ice age, as is currently happening in the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

“The Mississippi Delta region of Louisiana is undergoing changes due to rising waters, the sinking of Earth’s crust, and sediments compacting along the Mississippi River. “ 

“...drought caused approximately 500,000 ha of excess forest mortality between 1987 and 2016 in Europe....drought is an important driver of tree mortality at the continental scale, and suggest that a future increase in drought could trigger widespread tree mortality in Europe.” 

“Rising temperatures and droughts have made trees in Germany more vulnerable to attacks by bark beetles and other insects... “In recent years, the native forests have suffered from drought and hot spells,”... “Pests like bark beetle can multiply increasingly quickly in already weakened trees.”... Beetle-infested trees have to be cut down to prevent the pest from spreading through entire forests. ... Last year, timber damaged by insects and other threats accounted for two-thirds of all felling in German forests, compared to 20% in 2010. Most of the species cut down — 83% — were conifers such as spruce, fir, pine and larch.”

“Solomon Islands is currently one of the world’s most heavily forested nations, with some 80 percent of its total area covered in tropical trees and foliage. By 2036, the government estimates, that could all be gone....– struggling with climate change—swallowed up by rising sea levels, battered by extreme weather, and living through unpredictable seasons that ruin crops—the results would be catastrophic.” 

“These ghost forests — marked by thousands of leafless, limbless trunks, stumps and toppled trees where healthy forests once stood — have taken over about 11% of the tree cover in North Carolina’s Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in the past three decades, the researchers found, resulting in tens of thousands of acres of dead greenery.… Die-offs like these are an expected effect of sea-level rise, which exposes more land to salty seawater, which literally sucks the moisture out of seeds and soil,”

“The first national look at tree mortality in Israel showed vast stretches disappearing, thanks largely to scorching heat and wildfires. In a country largely blanketed by stone and sand, forests mean a great deal. Trees support nests for eagles and habitat for wolves and jackals. They hold soil with their roots. Without them, plants that normally rise in trees’ shadows are suddenly exposed to higher temperatures and bright light.” “Trees are these big plants that design the ecosystems for all the other plants and animals,” says Tamir Klein at the Weizmann Institute of Science.... Earlier this month Klein met with the Israeli forestry chief to talk about the country’s southern forests, which may not survive the century."

“Global warming is an emerging factor responsible for the increasing tree mortality in drought-prone ecosystems. In the southwestern Iberian Peninsula, Mediterranean holm oak open woodlands currently undergo large-scale population-level tree die-off… Climate change may have exacerbated or predisposed trees to the impact of other factors (e.g. intense management and pathogens).”

“Major forest die-offs due to drought, heat and beetle infestations or deforestation could have consequences far beyond the local landscape. say scientists. Wiping out an entire forest can have significant effects on global climate patterns and alter vegetation on the other side of the world..removing trees in western North America causes cooling in Siberia, which slows forest growth there. Tree loss in the western U.S. also makes air drier in the southeastern U.S., which harms forests in places like the Carolinas..” 

“Patterns, mechanisms, projections, and consequences of tree mortality and associated broad-scale forest die-off due to drought accompanied by warmer temperatures—“hotter drought”, an emerging characteristic of the Anthropocene—are the focus of rapidly expanding literature.”