How can we protect peat bogs

Large heath butterfly Yesterday An impressive landscape teeming with unique wildlife As nutrient-poor peat bogs became established, specially adapted plants and animals moved in and were able to survive in the sodden, acidic environment.

A whole ecosystem gradually emerged and peat bog developed a rich and unique character of its own. Lowland peat bog, in England, covers less than one tenth of its original 38, ha. Agricultural claim, forestry, landfill and peat extraction has devastated this habitat and much of the peat extraction has been carried out on, or next to, some of our most important remaining peat bogs.

Today, one of the greatest threats to our peat bogs is from our continued use of peat in the garden. The gardening hobby that brings many of us a great deal of pleasure is doing so at the expense of our wildlife. Peat bogs absorb and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Protecting them through land preservation and fire prevention is a prime opportunity to manage global greenhouse gases. When peat is exposed to the air, the carbon it contains gets oxidized into carbon dioxide. It can take thousands of years to build up peat, but a matter of only a few to release its greenhouse cache once it is degraded. Though not as effective as halting degradation before it starts, restoring drained and damaged peatlands is an essential complement to protection.

If the total protected area of peatlands increases from 8. In addition, protection would secure the intact stock of gigatons of carbon, or roughly gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent.

Though peatlands comprise only 3 percent of global land area, they are the most organic-rich soils; their degradation would release an enormous amount of carbon. Our analysis shows that rewetting of Despite that, the peatlands have tremendous value for carbon storage.

But in many places, humans have turned vast expanses of these environments from long-term carbon sinks into carbon sources. And emissions from bogs are expected to rise sharply. Secrets of life in the soil.

As the threat of climate change has grown more severe, researchers and governments have identified peatlands as ideal targets for stopping emissions, and even sopping up carbon. Scotland will probably meet, if not exceed, its goal of restoring 50, hectares, mainly on government-owned nature reserves and forestry land. And it aims to push that total to , hectares by Restoring peatlands to health is one of the key ways in which Scotland, which last April became the first country to declare a climate emergency, intends to reach net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by Researchers from around the world have flocked to Scotland to glean insights into how to develop a successful national strategy for restoring peatland.

Sources: Z. Yu et al. The biggest question is whether restoration will simply stop carbon emissions from peatlands or revive the bogs to the point that they can store more carbon. Other countries, notably Indonesia, are also pursuing efforts to reduce carbon losses from their peatlands.

To make sure that these projects are working, researchers are developing satellite techniques and other tools to monitor the health of these landscapes. But there is no guarantee that the efforts will pay off.

Just over kilometres southwest of Thurso, the boggy soil is so sodden in spots that I sink up to my knees and nearly lose a boot. As part of an effort to convert the region back to bogs, they trundle across the peat, cutting and stacking stands of trees that have been there for 30 years. Humans versus Earth: the quest to define the Anthropocene.

The timber is low quality, pockmarked by hungry pests and prone to being blown down, a hallmark of trees that are growing in acidic peat. Neil McInnes and Tim Cockerill oversee this and other restoration projects undertaken by Forestry and Land Scotland, a government land-management agency based in Inverness. The harvest costs more than the timber is worth, and because the trees will be either incinerated on site to generate electricity or made into heating pellets, the carbon in the trees will return to the atmosphere.

Removing the trees was a bitter pill at first. Many foresters felt they were being unfairly criticized for having planted them in the first place — even though it had been a government directive at the time.

But McInnes says that attitudes have changed over the past few years as people have grown to understand the carbon-storage potential of peatlands, and the Scottish government has made it a priority to reduce emissions. An excavator reshapes a bare peat bank to reduce erosion and promote regrowth of vegetation. Early peatland-restoration efforts began in Flow Country in , focused more on restoring bird habitats. The agenda gained momentum in , when the International Union for Conservation of Nature launched the UK Commission of Inquiry on Peatlands to assess the state of these ecosystems.

That effort — along with widespread support for tackling climate change — triggered more interest in nursing peatlands back to health. Now, Russell says, the political push for peatland restoration is focused mainly on keeping carbon locked up.

In a public survey see go. Andersen is working with McInnes and Cockerill, as well as various organizations, to determine how best to manage the land for carbon storage. To gather evidence, she and her colleagues have installed four towers in Flow Country since to monitor the flow of gases and temperature, among other variables.

Sensors near the towers measure heat flux, water level, soil temperature and precipitation. In the data collected so far, Andersen and her colleagues have detected some promising changes 2. They found that the first patches of restored peatlands, in which trees were simply cut and rolled into the blocked drainage ditches, switched from a carbon source to a carbon sink after 16 years. Although that work demonstrated that transitioning forest back to bog can be an effective way to restore a carbon sink, the researchers found that they could get faster results with more intensive management — such as clearing the carbon-rich trees and branches and flattening the ground.

They developed a program of using cover crops of legumes to suppress weeds and injecting select bacteria into the soil to decompose organic matter rapidly, which provides extra nutrients to the soil without burning.

They are also encouraging farmers to steer away from planting oil palm and instead focus on a diverse set of crops. But even finding and protecting peatlands may not be enough in a warming world. Here, 10 massive open-air chambers sit along three boardwalks. In some of these eight-meter high chambers, researchers are adding heat — both above and below the peat — to mimic a warmer atmosphere.

In other chambers, researchers have added higher concentrations of CO2. Some get both treatments. Spruce scientists are trying to answer a potentially world-changing question: How will peatlands react as the world warms and CO2 concentrations rise?

Scientists fear that peatlands may go from being a carbon sink to a massive, unstoppable source. If climate change causes peatlands to dry out, it could mean a slow — or possibly sudden — release of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Further warming, more potential release of CO2: a textbook example of a positive feedback loop.

Even more worrying are the bogs, fens and peatlands locked in the permafrost further north: if those melt, researchers fear a sudden influx of massive amounts of both CO2 and methane. The project is in its infancy, but Kolka says so far the good news is highlighted in a Spruce study that found heating the peat does not result in a loss of carbon or methane below one foot, which means old carbon may stay locked away even in a significantly warmer world.