One stop on what Karen Willis Amspacher calls her ghost tour is a cemetery in Davis, an unincorporated Carteret County community of about 250 and once a thriving commercial fishing hub.
Near the edge of the Core Sound on the Down East peninsula, the burial ground is one of dozens of family and community cemeteries scattered throughout this sparsely populated, low-lying coastal landscape.
The purpose of the stop and the excursion in late June is not to explore the supernatural; it’s to observe the slow, but relentless toll of rising seas.
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At the edge of the graveyard is a patch of dead trees known as “ghost forests,” a general term to describe contiguous areas of trees strangled by saltwater.
Ghost forests have become one of the most visible signs of climate change on North Carolina’s coast where rising seas and saltwater intrusion are transforming forests and waterfront communities. As researchers race to understand the problem, local leaders are searching for ways to adapt to a landscape steadily changing landscape.
The informal tour is one of many led by Amspacher, executive director of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum and Heritage Center on Harkers Island, and today is joined by Kiera O’Donnell, East Carolina University assistant professor of earth, environment and planning. O’Donnell’s research studies how communities and ecosystems respond to environmental change such as the impact of saltwater intrusion and sea-level rise, a growing area of research known as SWISLR.
The two women connected through the Down East Resilience Network, an effort spearheaded in 2022 by Amspacher to bring together researchers and community members interested in understanding ghost forests, sea level rise and the social, economic and environmental impacts of climate change. The goal is to address the challenges facing Down East communities and develop solutions that allow residents to live, if they choose, within a landscape increasingly shaped by environmental changes.
The spread of the bleached spires of lifeless trees, a mix of hardwoods and evergreens, are particularly pronounced on low-lying areas, such as the marshy neck of land spreading northeast of Harkers Island. The peninsula is dotted with 13 small, rural waterfront communities, such as Davis, Atlantic, Sea Level, Marshallberg, Smyrna, Gloucester, known collectively as Down East. The rural and remote Carteret County area is particularly prone to flooding because of its ultraflat landscape.
Ghost forests may be a way to identify where saltwater intrusion is happening. Graveyards close to shore are another visible sign of the impact of rising sea levels on this coastal landscape; high tides, waves, and saltwater inundation can damage headstones, wash out shorelines and expose remains.
Sometimes, cemeteries can be difficult to access.
“It’s very common for funerals and the burial to be at different times, because if it’s raining or it’s high tide, you can’t get to the cemetery,” Amspacher said.
Raised in the 1950s and 1960s during the heyday of North Carolina commercial fishing, she worries about whether Down East communities can endure the economic and environmental challenges.
“The tide is going to win,” she said. “I know we can’t change it, but can we buy time? Can we get another generation? Another 30 years?”
Ghost forests as ecological tipping points
Over a decade ago, Duke University ecosystem ecologist and biogeochemist Emily Bernhardt, now at Cornell University, noticed large sections of dead trees along Interstate 40 near Wilmington. Around the same time she and colleagues observed a kill-off of young trees and saltwater intrusion in a forest restoration project near Columbia, on the Albemarle Sound in Tyrrell County. Most were likely a casualty of increased salinity in waters edging the forest.
“At the time, it was surprising to us,” she told Carolina Public Press in 2022. “Suddenly, more and more people were saying, ‘Oh, wow, I’m seeing these dead trees.’ It sort of slapped us in the face.”
In decades past, large portions of the Down East peninsula’s interior were drained by hydrological infrastructure, such as canals and ditches to pump seawater out to transform its soggy landscape into farmland.
But today, without protective measures, the hyper-connectivity of the drainage canals serve the opposite purpose.
As the sea level rises, saltwater creeps inland as if the ditch is a seesaw tilting inland. Instead of helping agriculture thrive, the canals have become conduits for sea water to go even farther inland.
Saltwater inundation from storm surges and exceptionally high tides also saturates soils, reducing oxygen available to tree roots, triggering a die off and inhospitable to regrowth.
Dying trees Down East may also be an indicator of an ecological tipping point, which is a critical threshold where a gradual change in an ecosystem’s environment triggers a sudden, dramatic and often irreversible shift into a completely new ecological state.
North Carolina State University ecosystem ecologist Marcelo Ardón studies the expansion of ghost forests to try and answer questions about the pace and impact of the loss of coastal forests to saltwater intrusion, such as identifying early indicators, understanding the pace of transformation, and what type of ecosystem the forest will become.
In the late 2000s, Ardón, then a researcher in Bernhardt’s lab at Duke, was working alongside her in a restored inshore wetland when the pair first observed the tree die-off in Tyrrell County.
“When we started working I was able to use regular knee boats,” he said. The next year he switched to hip waders. The following year, chest waders. “Eventually we had to abandon the site. It got too wet, the trees died and the canopy opened up. Sea-level rise was literally happening in front of us.”
The impact of losing coastal forests, however, is nuanced. How fast a forest dies is hard to predict. And studies have shown that the transformation can take anywhere from 5 to 30 years.
If the loss of forest occurs gradually, a marsh may have enough time to establish and adapt to the changing conditions. In terms of ecological services, Ardón said not much difference exists in the amount of carbon stored in a healthy wetland forest, a ghost forest or a marsh. Birds, such as the marsh wren, may actually appreciate the expansion of habitat.
“You’re basically just changing from one type of wetland to another. The problem is that in some places the transformation is occurring so fast the forest just drowns and becomes open water,” Ardón said, such as the wetland forest on the Albemarle-Pamlico Peninsula. “That’s when you definitely have a loss of all sorts of ecosystem services; you’re losing the carbon sequestration from the plants and soils, and you’re losing the habitat.”
Acceptance
In 2023, Amspacher led a ghost tour for a group of SWISLR researchers organized by Bernhardt and O’Donnell, then a post-doctoral researcher at Duke to explore the visible signs of sea-level rise. According to Amspacher, both scientists were surprised to see new homes rising among groves of ghost forests and other visible signs of a landscape being transformed by rising seas and salt water incursion.
“It’s human nature to focus on big events, such as hurricanes, that have a big impact on people’s lives,” O’Donnell said. “But we find over and over in ecological research that things like nuisance flooding or saltwater intrusion can be more detrimental in some places than a single hurricane or storm event.”
For example, her research includes how saltwater intrusion may affect septic systems by looking at how rising salinity and water level could alter surrounding soils, shortening the tank’s lifespan and increasing the risk of contaminants reaching groundwater.
O’Donnell is also interested in how communities respond to the environmental changes.
“Ghost forests are part of the pressure of acknowledging how your landscape is changing,” she said. O’Donnell is watching to see if the growing presence of dead forest may nudge Down East communities towards a social tipping point in which the combined effects of environmental and economic pressures lead to a broader shift in public awareness and action.
“When you’ve grown up in a place and have a deep connection, to see the loss of land, ground water rising, and instead of a green canopy you see a bunch of dead trees; I think that’s when people say this is a big risk and we need to do something about it,” she said.
The moment of existential recognition for Amspacher occurred a decade ago. At the time, her mother was ailing and she approached her son, who was attending college out-of-state.
“You’re the oldest, I said, do you want Grandmama’s house on Harkers Island, or do you want Granny’s house in Marshallberg? You get the first choice,” Amspacher pointed through the windshield at a cluster of dead trees as she recalled the story. “After 15-20 minutes he finally said ‘how about neither; mama, they won’t be there in 50 years.’ I thought I was gonna die. At that point climate change and sea-level rise became my issue.”
An acceptance of a changing climate, however, is in the minority Down East and folks here are often weary of outside perspectives. Visitors and people with second homes are referred to as coming from “off” or “dingbatters”.
O’Donnell said Amspacher is giving people Down East an opportunity to be part of the climate resilience conversation through community focused events and connect the dots between the impacts of environmental change on their daily lives, regardless of their acceptance of climate change.
“In this political climate it’s hard to talk about climate change, which then makes it hard to talk about solutions,” O’Donnell said, but starting at an issue, such as nuisance flooding, is usually a sensible place to start. “People here are very connected to nature and know what’s happening in their backyard.”
Retired educator Chris Yeomans, who grew up on Harkers Island and sometimes leads a version of the ghost tour to university students and researchers, said he first noticed the tree-die off following Hurricane Florence in 2018.
“People don’t subscribe to a lot of climate change theories, but you can’t argue the point that trees are dying and flooding is happening more frequently,” he said. “Why is it happening? You can give your own interpretation but there’s no doubt. It’s kind of like two plus two is four.”
In either case, the category 1 storm that nailed Down East on September 14, 2018, was a game changer. Amspacher’s museum was among the casualties, suffering millions of dollars in damage.
As researchers started to pay more attention to sea level rise and ghost forests, Amspacher became a trusted bridge between researchers and the community. She formed the Down East Resilience Network as a project of the Core Sound museum, creating an exchange of local and scientific knowledge.
DERN hosts a regular speaker series exploring the relationship between people and coordinates initiatives, such as the Sunny Day Flooding Project in collaboration with the University of North Carolina and NC State University which provides tools for living with more persistent tidal flooding.
This coordination fills an important gap Down East where a tradition of self-reliance has left most communities unincorporated in which fire departments, churches, and schools are the closest things to local governance.
Awareness
Ardón of NC State began collaborating with Amspacher in 2023 to develop classroom activities and educational material with his students to help the public understand ghost forests and sea-level rise. For example, along a nature trail near the museum, a kiosk encourages visitors to photograph a threatened stand of trees and upload to a website to build a time sequence of the forest. Another student project created a brochure to raise awareness about ghost forests.
A key challenge however, Ardón said, is presenting these issues to build awareness, but without creating despair.
The retreat of once-healthy forests is just one item on a long list of traumas residents of Down East have endured over the years, including devastating storms, new generations leaving for jobs elsewhere, and losing their identity as a commercial fishing hub. While commercial fishing still has a meaningful footprint Down East, disappearing working waterfront infrastructure and an aging workforce have diminished its presence. Its slump, according to local residents, is compounded by overreaching fishing regulations.
“It’s depressing,” he admitted. “So one of the things that I always tell my students is, yes, there’s urgency to these problems, but we have agency, and we can do something about it.”
For many, choices may include raising homes, transforming lawns into marsh, building bulkheads at the shoreline, or moving.
Yeomans’ grandmother migrated in the early 20th century from nearby Shackleford Banks, a barrier island on the other side of the Core Sound, now part of the Cape Lookout National Seashore. Over several decades families began to pack up and leave following a hurricane in 1899, many coming to Harkers Island and other Down East communities.
“Grandma used to tell me when the dead people started floating out of the graves it was time for the living people to leave,” he said. Yeomans predicts a similar exodus Down East, but for now people are still holding on. In fact, his grown daughter recently returned to Harkers Island and purchased a home on relatively high ground.
Despite the threats, people want to make sure their family is protected and safe and set up for success, O’Donnell said.
“They are often looking for solutions to buy time for the next generation,” she said. But those decisions they face are sometimes costly, often painful and assuredly tangled in a deep connection to this unique landscape.
Amspacher’s ghost tour starts and ends in Marshallberg, where she lives. We pass an anchor half buried as a lawn ornament, a lament to the area’s close relationship with the water and perhaps a sign of things to come.
Before we finish, we drive past her home which has flooded three times. After Florence a building assessor recommended she elevate the house.
“I decided I wasn’t going to do it. One, if I raise it enough to do any real good it’s gonna look stupid. I love that house because it’s Granny’s, and if I raise it, it won’t be Granny’s anymore,” she said as her voice wavered. “It just wouldn’t be the same.”
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