"If the District of Columbia were nine times larger, it still wouldn’t equal the area of forests lost to saltwater intrusion along Maryland’s coasts in the past decade alone.

Every July, when Heather Disque surveys the landscape from her state-issued Cessna, she documents thousands more acres of trees in death throes. It’s only a matter of a few years before they wither into desiccated husks and topple over, she said. By then, the ground itself likely will be wetter, having converted to a saltmarsh.

During her first few years conducting the aerial surveys, Disque was surprised by how rapidly the forests were failing. Then, she looked at computer climate models, showing which areas are expected to become inundated first because of sea level rise.

“A lot of these forested areas we’re seeing are in those predicted impact areas,” said Disque, who studies forest health as part of the state Department of Natural Resources’ pest management efforts. “So, it’s not surprising to see what was predicted is coming true.”

Across many of the low-lying shorelines along the Chesapeake Bay, formerly healthy forests are transforming into “ghost forests” — stands of dead trees sandwiched between marshes on lower ground and living forests on higher ground. Human-caused climate change is accelerating sea level rise, the main culprit behind the phenomenon, scientists say.

A similar process is playing out on coastal cropland, and a recent spate of research has begun to propose strategies to help farmers cope with saltwater intrusion. But no such aid appears to be in the offing for timber, the fifth largest industry in Maryland and the second largest in Virginia.

“The question I get over the last five years is what can a forest landowner do,” said Matthew Hurd, who oversees the Maryland Forest Service’s Eastern Shore region, which has been the epicenter of the ghost forest blight in the state. “And the answer is pretty abstract at the moment.”

He added, “If they’re already being impacted, it’s already too late.”

Matt Kirwan, a coastal ecologist with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science, is one of the region’s leading ghost forest researchers and owns a salt-impacted forest tract with his father in Maryland’s Dorchester County. It’s rare to find any formal advice for landowners, he said.

“The advice is basically ‘pay attention,’” Kirwan noted. “There are almost no recommendations.”

For many observers, ghost forests stand out as a palpable symbol of climate change.

“Some of the changes are really dramatic,” said Greg Noe, a U.S. Geological Survey wetland ecologist based in Delaware. “Ghost forests are enigmatic. They’re big changes. They’re an effective canary in the coal mine for demonstrating sea level rise on the landscape.”

They haunt coastlines along parts of the East Coast, bending around the Gulf of Mexico as well. The Chesapeake region has been particularly susceptible, experts say, because much of its land is sinking due to groundwater withdrawals and the falling of the Earth’s crust in the post-glacial period. As a result, the “relative” rate of sea level rise has been about twice the global rate. . ."

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