Ghost Forest Dead Trees Soak Up Stemflow Like Sponges
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- Samantha Chittakone, an undergraduate environmental engineering student at the University of Delaware, will present the ghost forest stemflow study at the American Chemical Society (ACS 2026) spring meeting in Atlanta, March 22–26.
- University of Delaware researchers collected sweetgum tree stemflow from healthy, dead, and stressed trees along the mid-Atlantic coastline and found dead trees delivered significantly less stemflow to the forest floor than living ones.
- Yu-Ping Chin explained that dead trees act 'like sponges,' absorbing the stemflow and cutting off water, nutrients, and dissolved organic carbon to the forest floor microbiome that depends on those inputs.
- The team found unexpectedly high sugar concentrations in stemflow from dead and stressed trees, which co-author Delphis Levia speculated could alter microbial communities in the near-trunk soil.
- The paper, titled 'Linking stemflow to groundwater in ghost forests: Accessing tracers and impacts of tree health on dissolved organic carbon composition,' ties tree death to changes in dissolved carbon inputs that govern how coastal forests store carbon.
- Co-authors include Robyn O'Halloran and Yu-Ping Chin, and Chin noted the team is applying the same stemflow diagnostic to wildfire research, saying, 'We're kind of preaching the gospel… to our own scientific community.'
Why it matters: Climate scientists and coastal forest managers gain a concrete diagnostic — stemflow chemistry — to detect which coastal forests are on the verge of collapse before the trees visibly die. Because dying trees disrupt underground carbon and nutrient delivery on top of removing canopy cover, the University of Delaware findings give researchers a way to track carbon-cycling breakdown in real time along the vulnerable mid-Atlantic coastline.
