Rising water is an underappreciated driver of forest mortality
- 1University of Virginia
Abstract
Forests are known to burn and desiccate under a changing climate; less appreciated is that they also drown. Across much of the globe, a warming atmosphere is amplifying the length and intensity of both droughts and floods. Whereas massive die-offs from drought and fire are widely studied as consequences of climate change on forests, inundation-induced mortality remains poorly quantified. Using approximately 1 m resolution aerial imagery and deep learning, we tracked over 260 million dead trees across the United States' Great Lakes and ocean coastlines from 2012 to 2023. Within 10 km of the coasts, more than half of mapped mortality was concentrated in just 10% of forests, primarily in high-elevation inland wetlands and low-lying forests prone to inundation. Mortality rates doubled within a decade around expanding freshwater lakes and in inland wetlands experiencing intensifying regional-scale precipitation, while tripling in low-lying coastal forests where salinization compounded inundation in sea-level rise hotspots. Our findings identify rising waters as a widespread, underappreciated driver of forest die-off that can extend far inland, underscoring the need to reassess the impacts of climate change on the functioning, demography, and carbon-methane budgets amongst the world's most carbon-rich forests as seas rise and hydroclimate shifts globally.
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BibTeX
@misc{yeung2026rising,
title = {{Rising water is an underappreciated driver of forest mortality}},
author = {H. C. H. Yeung and T. M. Pavelsky and C. Wang and N. G. McDowell and R. E. Emanuel and E. S. Liu and E. S. Bernhardt and X. Yang},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
doi = {10.64898/2026.09.21.753189},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.21.753189v1},
note = {CC BY},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Rising water is an underappreciated driver of forest mortality
AU - H. C. H. Yeung
AU - T. M. Pavelsky
AU - C. Wang
AU - N. G. McDowell
AU - R. E. Emanuel
AU - E. S. Liu
AU - E. S. Bernhardt
AU - X. Yang
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/21
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.09.21.753189
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.09.21.753189v1
AB - Forests are known to burn and desiccate under a changing climate; less appreciated is that they also drown. Across much of the globe, a warming atmosphere is amplifying the length and intensity of both droughts and floods. Whereas massive die-offs from drought and fire are widely studied as consequences of climate change on forests, inundation-induced mortality remains poorly quantified. Using approximately 1 m resolution aerial imagery and deep learning, we tracked over 260 million dead trees across the United States' Great Lakes and ocean coastlines from 2012 to 2023. Within 10 km of the coasts, more than half of mapped mortality was concentrated in just 10% of forests, primarily in high-elevation inland wetlands and low-lying forests prone to inundation. Mortality rates doubled within a decade around expanding freshwater lakes and in inland wetlands experiencing intensifying regional-scale precipitation, while tripling in low-lying coastal forests where salinization compounded inundation in sea-level rise hotspots. Our findings identify rising waters as a widespread, underappreciated driver of forest die-off that can extend far inland, underscoring the need to reassess the impacts of climate change on the functioning, demography, and carbon-methane budgets amongst the world's most carbon-rich forests as seas rise and hydroclimate shifts globally.
ER -