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.
Although these more intensive strategies can trigger an initial pulse of greenhouse-gas emissions by disturbing the soil, once it is more uniformly wet this can also accelerate the switch from carbon source to sink — bringing it down to as little as ten years, says Andersen. Staff with the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds install dams to block drains in a former forest plantation at Forsinard Flows. These results mirror research in Canada that found it takes one to two decades for peatlands to recover following restoration efforts 3.
Politicians in many countries, including the United Kingdom, have been eagerly promoting efforts to plant more trees. Scotland planted 11, hectares of new woodlands in These new arboreal ambitions could make it harder for researchers and officials to argue that peatlands are the wrong places for trees. The key question about restoration efforts across the globe is how well they can slow greenhouse-gas emissions from bogs.
To answer that, researchers need cheaper and faster tools for assessing the health of peatland over wide areas. Because peatlands that are functioning well rise and fall with the level of the water table, the carbon emissions can be inferred from how the peat behaves, says Large. The team tested this method on 22 sites around the Flow Country over 18 months and found that wet, mossy peat in good condition — the least likely to be a carbon source — rises in mid-winter and falls in mid-summer 5.
Drier, shrubby peat, which is more likely to emit carbon, rises in late spring and falls in late summer. As a next step, the researchers plan to correlate their InSAR results with measurements of carbon emissions.
InSAR will offer funders and government officials a means of quantifying success, says Large. Large is now testing the tool in tropical peatlands, which he says are challenging because in areas such as southeast Asia, peat builds only under forest cover, and the trees cause trouble for InSAR.
If the methodology can be validated across peatland types and conditions, it could help governments to chose which areas to restore and to monitor how effective interventions have been, says Susan Page at the University of Leicester, UK, who studies peatlands in southeast Asia.
Other teams are developing different methods for monitoring peatland emissions. In the tropics, for example, researchers are tracking deforestation, which often precedes efforts to drain the peatlands.
Every country will have to develop its own monitoring system, says Hans Joosten, a peatland ecologist at the University of Greifswald in Germany. Monitoring is urgently needed in many regions, including Indonesia.
The country is plagued by seasonal fires that spread over dry peatlands and send billows of smoke across much of the country. A fire burns in in deforested peatland that is part of an oil-palm concession in Sumatra. Share: Twitter Facebook Pinterest Email. National Trust. Back to top. Search the site Search. We have been working hard to protect and restore peatland and other wetland areas across England. Increasing woodland cover across the nation is important for locking up carbon, but the wrong trees in the wrong places can have adverse impacts on the environment.
In the past, many trees were planted on peat bogs across Britain because it seemed a good use of the land at the time. We now know peatlands are hugely important for our climate and for rare wildlife. We make sure planting trees does not lead to the loss of other important habitats.
Removing trees from peatlands can help to restore the mosses that ensure peatlands, their function and wildlife can thrive.
That's why sometimes we chose not to replant after harvesting timber and create open habitat instead, where this will benefit the environment. Delamere Forest, Kielder Forest and the New Forest are three of the many areas where we're been restoring bog habitats.
Read on to find out about each project. The bogs at Delamere Forest date back to the last ice age, but in the s the majority of the site was drained to plant trees. The value of the habitat was recognised by local Forestry England staff during the s, when we started the pioneering restoration project with Cheshire Wildlife Trust and Natural England. Through careful habitat management, the lost mosses are continuing to be restored to this day using techniques and lessons learnt from the 90s.
Delamere Forest has at least bogs, nearly half of which have now been recently restored or restoration is underway. This has also been great news for wildlife. Working with Cheshire Wildlife Trust, we successfully reintroduced the locally extinct white-faced darter dragonfly to the forest. It was only the third time that any dragonflies have been the focus of a reintroduction scheme anywhere in Britain.
By Angela Nelson Angela Nelson. Angela Nelson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning digital editor and storyteller who covered a variety of general interest stories on MNN now part of Treehugger from Learn about our editorial process. Share Twitter Pinterest Email. Environment Weather Outdoors Conservation.
What Is Climate Sensitivity? Definition and Examples. What Is Blue Carbon? Definition and Importance. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for Treehugger. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page. These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data. We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification.
0コメント