Researchers at the College of William & Mary’s Batten School and Virginia Institute of Marine Science have discovered sea level rise is encroaching on farmland in the Mid-Atlantic region at nearly twice the rate as forested land. “Twenty-five thousand acres of farmland have been basically converted to marsh,” said VIMS professor Matt Kirwan, Ph.D. During his research for the study that was recently published in “Nature Sustainability,” Kirwan and his colleagues were surprised to learn how fast farmland was being affected by saltwater. The Gloucester-Mathews area was found to be the third most vulnerable to rising sea level saltwater impacts in the Mid-Atlantic. The low-lying, swampy areas of Guinea and Diggs are particularly affected. “They’re the areas that flood anyway,” said Kirwan. NASA satellite information collected from 1984-2022 showed 25,000 acres of farmland has been overtaken by sea level rise in the Mid-Atlantic—an encroachment that happened slowly over time. “The loss ...