‘It’s like a church’: Resurrecting New Jersey’s Atlantic white cedar ghost forests

A miles-long, sandy stretch of road dominated by thousands of acres of pitch pine trees suddenly yields the most primeval of scenes in New Jersey’s Pinelands — a healthy Atlantic white cedar swamp so thick and cool that the temperature can drop 15 degrees just a few feet within.

The 100-year-old cedars spire straight and tall, 80 feet, and only a tenth of the way toward their possible 1,000-year life span if undisturbed. A thick green tapestry of peat mounds their bases, as roots beneath form a dense network to drink from the surrounding water so dark it’s hard to see anything below except where a few stray shafts of sun penetrate.

“It’s like a church when you stare into a cedar forest,” says John Cecil, assistant commissioner of State Parks, Forests & Historic Sites at New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection. “It’s calm, it’s cool, and just a little bit of light comes through.”

Just a mile or two away stands another grove of cedars but stripped of green, like bleached bones, and dying amid a surrounding pond.

Cecil is part of a team at the DEP trying to resurrect New Jersey’s dying cedar forests, some now so barren they are referred to as ghost forests.

New Jersey has about 25,000 acres of still healthy Atlantic white cedar, or roughly one-quarter of the 100,000 acres left of such trees on the Eastern seaboard, from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico. The species is an evergreen and loves the boggy, wet parts of the Pine Barrens.

As recently as the 1990s, the state had 30,000 acres. When first settled, it had 125,000 acres of cedar then in high demand for its rot resistance and used to make cedar shingles for colonial Philadelphia.

The DEP hopes to restore another 10,000 acres of Atlantic white cedar, Chamaecyparis thyoides, on state-owned land over the next decade with $19 million from settlements with manufacturers and distributors of gasoline containing methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) that contaminated ground and surface water throughout the state. It is thought to be the largest restoration of the species in U.S. history.

Climate change is one of the biggest threats to cedars as sea levels rise and storm surges get bigger, forcing salt water further inland from the coast. The area around the trees destroyed by salt intrusion can’t be restored, so the state is focused on bringing back cedar forests in upland areas, which, in the Pine Barrens, might only be a few feet above sea level.

But beavers, deer, fire, and other factors also take their toll.

» READ MORE: Rising seas could be turning Jersey’s coastal cedars into ghost forests

“So we’ve lost the biodiversity, we’re losing the aboveground carbon in those trees, and they die,” Cecil said. “In many ways, it’s a tragedy. But the opportunity sits before us to restore these trees.”

Cecil and a handful of DEP officials toured locations of dying — and healthy — areas of cedar in Brendan T. Byrne State Forest on Thursday for Earth Week to explain efforts to return the species to parts of the state where they once thrived.

Atop a wooden bridge overlooking a tea-colored stream, DEP Commissioner Shawn LaTourette and other department experts said the state’s cedar trees were once widely harvested for lumber throughout the state. But the Pinelands Protection Act in 1979 helped preserve 1.1 million acres where big swaths of Atlantic white cedar still lived. Still, in those areas where cedars had been harvested, maples, gum, and other species took over.

LaTourette said cedars are a living carbon sink, or natural reservoir that captures and stores carbon, keeping it out of the atmosphere where it helps warm the planet. The cedar swamps also remove and filter pollutants, provide cover for animals, and provide paths for fish. The organic compounds formed amid the muck and soil give the Pine Barrens their unique red-brown water, often referred to as cedar water.

“We don’t protect our environment just because natural beauty should be preserved,” LaTourette said. “We do it, in part, because every single natural resource is doing something economically valuable for us ... cedar for example, as a function of its root structure, is absolutely phenomenal at holding back floodwater, filtering the surface water, and making our groundwater, which we draw for drinking water, even cleaner. So the trees are very valuable to the public.”

The Pine Barrens sit atop aquifers, including the Kirkwood-Cohansey Aquifer, a porous body of sand just under the surface containing 17 trillion gallons of freshwater that feeds the streams of the protected Pinelands and serves as drinking water for nearby residents and parts of the Shore.

In another section of Brendan T. Byrne State Forest, a cedar forest encircling a beaver pond lies stripped bare of vegetation, with spindly branches reaching out, unable any longer to capture sun. The beavers dammed up the stream, raising the water table to an intolerable level for the cedars.

A few-minute, bumpy drive away, a once similar ghost forest is emerging back to life from a restoration started in the 1990s.

Todd Wyckoff, New Jersey’s forest service chief, said a restoration is a complex undertaking. Workers might bring in heavy equipment to swampy areas to clear them of competing vegetation, creating conditions more favorable to cedar, allowing seeds to take naturally. They might erect fences to keep out deer.

Cedar are quick-growing and prolific once they get restarted, Wyckoff said, and need only a hard nudge to “capture” a site.

“They can come in at 7,000 trees per acre and grow up and outcompete other species,” Wyckoff said. “So you’re trying to tip the scales into the conditions that cedar trees prefer, which is open sunlight and away from their competition. But what they can’t do is grow up under a canopy of other trees.”

The DEP, however, is still identifying the best possible areas for restoration of the 10,000 acres and mapping out a strategy.

“And if we get those conditions right,” said LaTourette, the DEP commissioner, “nature will do its job.”