Like the giant bones planted in the ground, the trunks of the trees are visible with the bark, clean from the bark, on the mid -Atlantic coast of the United States. They are the forests of the past: its hunger remnants who were once standing in cedar and cedar. From the end of the 19th century, these trees have died to a large extent along the coast. And they will not return.
These Arberil cemetery are being shown in places where the earth slowly falls into the sea and where salty water crosses rapidly. Along the east coast of the United States, in the pockets of the west coast, and elsewhere, salty soil has killed millions of acres of trees, which are usually left behind the wood skeleton around the marsh.
What happens next? Depending on it. Since these dead forest transfers will become some swamps that maintain important environmental services, such as buffer against storms and storing carbon. Other people can become a home for invasive plants or not support the lives of any kind of plant – and the environmental system services will be eliminated. Researchers are working to understand how to change the swamps and the forests of the past, on balance, on how to affect the coastal ecosystem.
Many past forests are the result of rising sea levels, says Karen Gadan, a coastal environment expert at George Washington University in Washington. The salts of the coastal ecosystem In the annual review of Marine Science in 2025. The rising surface level increases more than the storm, which floods in saline water over the soil. Increase in drought and surface surface can move the ground water table along the coast, causing Trip to more than salted waterUnder the floor of the forest. Trees, deprivation of fresh water, put pressure on the accumulation of salt.
Gaden says that despite this, a residential transfer from the forest to the swamp does not have to be a tragedy. Swamps are also the main features of the coastal ecosystem. The rally has shifted from forest to marsh in the past, and in the past, the environmental system environment and biogo chemist at the North Carolina State University, Marselillo Arden, say.
“You’ll think of these forests and swamps to dance together on top and bottom of the coast.”
Swamp provide the benefits of many ecosystem. They are housing Birds and ChristiansSuch as salt marsh birds, swamps, crabs and muscles. They are also a niche for salt tolerant plants, such as rush and some grass, which provide food and shelter to animals.