AI tracks dying coastal forests turning into ghostly marshland
Tajudeen TT, Ardon M, Tulbure M, Martin KL
Climate Adaptation
If you've ever walked past a stretch of bare, gray tree trunks standing in salty marsh water along the coast, you've seen a ghost forest, and satellite data now shows these die-offs are spreading faster than before.
Along the North Carolina coast, saltwater creeping inland is killing freshwater-loving trees, leaving behind stark skeletons of dead trunks called ghost forests before the land turns into marsh. Researchers trained computer vision models on satellite photos spanning nearly 40 years to map exactly where and how fast this transformation is happening. They found the forest is disappearing quicker now than ever, with proximity to waterways and rising seas driving the change.
Key Findings
21% of coastal forest in the North Carolina study area was lost between 1985 and 2021
Forest loss accelerated: 23,876 hectares converted to marsh, ghost forest, or shrub between 2010-2021, versus 16,968 hectares lost over the prior 25 years (1985-2010)
Adding phenology and topographical data to satellite imagery improved AI classification accuracy, with Sentinel-2 achieving a 96.3 F1 score versus 93.4 for Landsat
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists used AI and satellite images to track how coastal forests in North Carolina are dying and turning into 'ghost forests' and marshes as sea levels rise. They found forest loss is accelerating, with 1.5 times more forest lost in the last decade compared to the previous 25 years.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Mapping coastal forest retreat using convolutional neural networks and different satellite imagery.
Coastal forests are increasingly threatened by saturated soil and elevated salinity levels resulting from sea level rise, saltwater intrusion, and storm surges. In response to rising salinization a...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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