Trick or Treet: Analyzing Drivers of Local Ghost Forest Formation along the Coastal Plain of North Carolina

Abstract

Ghost forests are regions of forested wetlands and upland forests within coastal plains that are dying due to saltwater intrusion and being replaced by more salt-tolerant vegetation. Although the magnitude and extent of ghost forests have become more widely understood, land managers are still left with challenges in identifying regional drivers of tree mortality. Given the absence of resources to inform management of ghost forests on a local scale, this project seeks to 1) develop an automated coding template to assess regional drivers of ghost forest formation, and 2) create an atlas to compare drivers of ghost forest formation between seven study sites in eastern NC. The coding template results indicate that inundation frequency and elevation were the two most ecologically significant drivers of tree mortality, while palustrine forested wetlands experienced the highest total number of dead trees. The atlas demonstrates how a culmination of figures and tables for each study site can be useful in identifying and comparing trends between regions.