A new satellite-based study finds that North Carolina’s coastal forests are disappearing faster than they used to. Researchers at North Carolina State University mapped the state’s coastal region from 1985 to 2021 and reported a 21% decline in coastal forest cover, about 64,220 hectares. Conversion to marsh, ghost forest and shrub was clearly faster in 2010–2021 than in 1985–2010. The study was published September 15, 2026, and NC State summarized it in an October 5, 2026 release.
These are measurements of mapped land-cover change through 2021. They are not a forecast, and they are not a count of every dead tree. The sections below cover what the numbers show, what is driving the loss, and what they can’t tell you.
What the study found
Lead author Titilayo Tajudeen, a graduate researcher at NC State, and colleagues used satellite imagery to classify the North Carolina coast into land-cover types and track how forest changed over 36 years. The study’s DOI is 10.1371/journal.pone.0357346. These are the headline figures from NC State’s release:
- 21% of coastal forest cover lost between 1985 and 2021, roughly 64,220 hectares. That is about 158,700 acres, by a simple unit conversion.
- More than 40,000 hectares shifted specifically to marsh, ghost forest and shrub over the whole period.
- The 64,220-hectare total is larger than the 40,000-hectare figure. The release does not break out what accounts for the difference, so treat the two numbers as different measures and don’t add or subtract them.
Two periods compared
| Measure | 1985–2010 (25 years) | 2010–2021 (11 years) |
|---|---|---|
| Forest converted to marsh, ghost forest and shrub | 16,968 ha | 23,876 ha |
| Ghost-forest expansion | 3,087 ha | 7,561 ha |
| Rough yearly average, all three conversions (my arithmetic) | about 680 ha per year | about 2,170 ha per year |
| Rough yearly average, ghost forest only (my arithmetic) | about 120 ha per year | about 690 ha per year |
The study figures come from NC State’s release. The per-year rows are simple averages I calculated by dividing each total by the length of its period. They are not rates reported by the researchers, and they ignore any year-to-year swings inside each interval. Even so, the 2010–2021 period covers less than half as many years and produced more conversion overall. Ghost-forest expansion grew the most, with a 2010–2021 total about 2.4 times the earlier one despite the much shorter window.
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Tajudeen put the recent figure this way: “Between 2010 and 2021, we saw 23,876 ha of forest were converted to marsh, ghost forest, and shrub.”
What “ghost forest” means here
A ghost forest is a stand of standing dead or dying trees, often bleached gray, left behind when the ground or water around them becomes too salty or too wet for the species to survive. The study treats it as one of three destinations for converting forest, alongside:
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- Marsh: salt-tolerant herbaceous vegetation that takes over once trees are gone.
- Shrub: a woody but non-forest cover that can replace dying trees.
Ghost forest is often a transitional stage, so a mapped transition is not necessarily final. Marsh and shrub are not the same as open water, and the figures should not be read as land lost to the sea.
Why the forests are dying
The study’s abstract names three key environmental drivers of conversion to ghost forest and marsh: proximity to channels, salinity and the increasing rate of relative sea-level rise. “Relative” sea-level rise combines rising oceans with local land movement, such as subsidence.
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Saltwater moving inland
The North Carolina Forest Service explains that saltwater can push inland during high tides and storm surge. Channels, including natural creeks and human-made canals and ditches, give it a path into low-lying woodland. That is consistent with the study’s finding that channel proximity matters.
Rising groundwater
Salt is not the only stressor. The Forest Service says rising coastal water tables can saturate soils and cut off the oxygen that roots need. Its account says groundwater-related mortality in the Coastal Plain can be as significant as saltwater intrusion, or more so. A forest can therefore decline even where surface water never turns salty.
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Drought and Hurricane Irene
NC State’s release notes that some affected areas had severe drought from 2007 to 2011, then Hurricane Irene in 2011. Tajudeen said: “This area experienced severe drought from 2007 to 2011, and then also Hurricane Irene in 2011.” Some of these areas did not recover even though they were protected. The study does not isolate how much each event contributed compared with sea-level rise. The better reading is that extreme events add stress to forests already under pressure, and that legal protection does not shield a site from rising water.
How the mapping was done
- Long record: Landsat imagery supports the 1985–2021 analysis, because it goes back far enough to cover multiple decades.
- Method: the team used convolutional neural networks, a type of image-recognition model. Adding phenological indices (seasonal vegetation patterns) and topographic indices improved the model’s ability to separate ghost forest from other vegetation.
- Sensor comparison: for 2021, the one year both sensors could be compared, the team classified imagery from Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2. The abstract reports F1 scores of 96.3 for Sentinel-2 and 93.4 for Landsat, so Sentinel-2 performed better in that comparison.
The F1 scores describe how well the classifier performed in this study’s 2021 comparison. They don’t guarantee equal accuracy in every location or year, and the long-term maps rely on the older Landsat record rather than the higher-scoring sensor.
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The Forest Service numbers are a separate measure
The North Carolina Forest Service’s 2025 Forest Health Highlights reports more than 61,000 acres of forestland mapped as affected by sea-level-rise-related factors. It estimates tree mortality from 1% to over 50% in the affected areas. That is an agency mapping effort with its own methods, acres rather than hectares, and a different definition of “affected.” It cannot be added to or compared directly with the NC State totals. It does show something the land-cover study does not: within an affected stand, losses range from light to severe.
What the findings do and don’t establish
- Not a forecast. The study shows that the 2010–2021 pace was higher than before. It does not quantify what happens next, and it would be wrong to extend that pace as a guaranteed trend.
- Not a tree count. The figures measure mapped land-cover transitions. A hectare classed as ghost forest or shrub isn’t necessarily every tree dead, and a stand still classed as forest may be stressed.
- Not a cost estimate. The sources reviewed do not quantify local economic or property impacts.
- Region-specific. The 21% refers to the study’s North Carolina coastal region over 1985–2021, not a current statewide measurement.
Earlier work points in the same direction. A 2020 paper in Environmental Research Letters (DOI 10.1088/1748-9326/aba136) examined aboveground carbon loss tied to ghost-forest spread as seas rise, and a 2021 study, “Rapid deforestation of a coastal landscape driven by sea-level rise and extreme events,” linked coastal forest loss to both sea-level rise and extreme events. The new study extends that picture across the whole coastal region and shows the pace picking up.
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