Details of Award
NERC Reference : NE/N008758/1
Erosion hotspots and carbon loss - a conundrum for peat restoration
Training Grant Award
- Lead Supervisor:
- Professor J Warburton, Durham University, Geography
- Grant held at:
- Durham University, Geography
- Science Area:
- Atmospheric
- Earth
- Freshwater
- Terrestrial
- Overall Classification:
- Terrestrial
- ENRIs:
- Biodiversity
- Environmental Risks and Hazards
- Global Change
- Natural Resource Management
- Science Topics:
- Hydrological Processes
- Peatlands
- Earth Surface Processes
- Peatlands
- Soil science
- Peat
- Water Quality
- Peatlands
- Survey & Monitoring
- Peatland carbon
- Abstract:
- Over the last 20 years British peatlands have undergone a transformation as a restoration culture has become to pervade the management of these landscapes. As a result many eroded and bare peat landscapes have begun to repair and vegetate leaving increasingly fragmented areas of bare peat. Such areas are the focus of continued erosion and are hard to restore and often difficult to access and so while large areas of peatland are brought back in to being functioning, peat growing areas these hotspots of erosion continue to threaten the overall carbon balance of the landscape and their continued growth may limit the efforts of restoration. However, the significance of these local areas (hotspots) of erosion for tipping the carbon balance of the uplands and subduing more natural habitat is not fully understood. Therefore it is important to ask whether the effort, and expense, required to restore these small, often disparate, areas has a significant benefit or should such areas be left alone as their impact on the restored ecosystem services of the uplands is negligible compared to the cost of further restoration? Therefore, together with our collaborating partner, the Peatlands Programme of the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, we will assess the important contribution hotspots of local erosion play in reducing the impact of restoration in upland peatlands. Our objectives are to: 1) Understand the current distribution, size, and connectedness of bare soil hotspots and how this has changed in the historic past within English upland peat catchments. 2) Undertake a series of field measurements to understand the dynamics of bare peat patches. The study will seek to understand how bare patches contribute to carbon losses and how the size, shape and organisation of patches across the landscape changes, evolves and impacts on such fluxes. 3) Develop a management strategy for the restoration of erosion hotspots and devise techniques that will yield greatest benefit to the local community / economy within acceptable timescales. 4) Test possible interventions to target and restrict the impact of bare peat hotspots. The project utilises existing resources and expert knowledge to address these key goals and combines aerial mapping, field measurements and modelling to understand and target hotspots of erosion. Mapping involves a combination of aerial imagery and ground based survey, to determine the extent of bare patches and how these are connected in the landscape. Surveys will be repeated for an historical series of aerial photographs available for the study sites which allow us to study the development of patches through time. Detailed mapping will be used to construct a typology of these bare patches. At several key sites, chosen on the basis of the typology produced from the mapping task, detailed measurements will be undertaken on eroding margins, vegetating margins and core areas of bare peat patches. The significance of wind and water erosion will be measured alongside monitoring of local hydrology and carbon uptake and loss pathways. Our measurements will allow us to characterise the main components of the local carbon budget providing an assessment of patch scale carbon dynamics and physical peat fluxes. Using information from the mapping and process measurements we can scale up the results to the catchment scale and assess the overall contribution erosion hotspots make to the carbon balance of the area. Based on this information and using the expert knowledge of our case partner we will develop a rulebased model for targeting restoration based on accessibility and the net erosion remediation / carbon sequestration that can be accrued, and from these results we can target an intervention experiment. The focus of our field study will be the North Pennines, UK to take advantage of knowledge from ongoing research and restoration projects in the area and an unparalleled archive of historical data.
- NERC Reference:
- NE/N008758/1
- Grant Stage:
- Completed
- Scheme:
- DTG - directed
- Grant Status:
- Closed
- Programme:
- Industrial CASE
This training grant award has a total value of £86,776
FDAB - Financial Details (Award breakdown by headings)
| Total - Fees | Total - RTSG | Total - Student Stipend |
|---|---|---|
| £16,957 | £11,000 | £58,822 |
If you need further help, please read the user guide.