Peatland experts share perspectives from positions in local government and a public research institution on the impact of blanket bog restoration. These unique upland ecosystems are beloved by farmers, sheep, and schoolchildren alike!
Transcript
Laurent: So now let's talk about the complexity of fieldwork. Basically, Snowdonia is the first peatland restoration project partly funded through carbon credits in Wales. Snowdonia National Park Authority led the project. While, Forest Carbon Ltd. acted as broker. Can you first maybe describe the restoration site in Wales?
Rachel: This site, it sits at the top of the second highest pass in Wales, so it's really high up for us anyway. Not as high as some places in the US, for example. There's been quite a lot of drainage there in the past, grazing, that sort of thing. Those are quite a lot of the pressures we get on our peatlands. So this particular site, we were re-wetting it by blocking some of the gullies and managing the water flow where there's quite a lot of water, you can't block it completely, but we can still slow the flow. Another thing we did was reprofile peat hags. So these are cliffs of vertical bare peat, so we sort of flatten them out as much as we can and revegetate them. So we don't want any bare peat left because there's a lot of emissions that come from bare peat. Peat hags, they're very dark in color and quite hard to walk over for people and livestock alike, although the sheep do like sheltering behind some of them. We're quite lucky in Wales that most of our gullies are still vegetated, but they're still lower and drier than they should be. They sort of sink down into the ground a bit, and then we'll often have these hags running along the side of them as well.
Laurent: These wetlands, how are people interacting with them in the present?
Rachel: In Snowdonia, it's very much a working environment. It is what we call a national park, but it doesn't fit the international definition of a national park because it's actually people living and working in the park. Our peatlands are farmed. They're grazed usually by sheep. In the past, it would have probably been a mix of sheep and cattle. But more recent agri-environmental schemes with the government payment schemes for farmers have shifted more towards sheep. They actually drained a lot of these peatlands by digging out artificial ditches. And this was a really common practice after the Second World War right through till 1970s or so. In some cases, we are paying farmers to block the ditches that their dads put in just a few decades ago.
Laurent: How is it perceived by the population, this shift from more productive landscape to something more natural?
Rachel: Well, it was never that productive, even though they tried to make it more productive with the ditches. Unfortunately, they became dangerous for the sheep. In Mid Wales, you've got loads and loads of Molinia coming in, which it just dominates. It's type of grass that just dominates, and you lose all the heather when you put too many sheep on. When we've been restoring places like the Migneint where Mike's been working, the farmers there have found that they're losing a lot fewer sheep now because we've closed the ditches, those dangerous ditches. It's easier for them to gather the sheep after the summer because they're not losing them down these ditches, they haven't got peat hags in the way. They can use them a lot easier now that we're restoring them back to what they should be.
Mike: It's worth noting there was a little bit of local opposition to the re-wetting on the Migneint when it started. There was a headline in the local news and a quote from a local farmer. saying they'll be wanting us to grow rice up there next. I think they thought the re-wetting was going to turn it all into this huge lake. There was this local perception in one of the villages below the bog that after the restoration, the water was running at lower flows and that it was clearer it had less dissolved organic carbon in, none of which we particularly tested at the catchment scale. So it was interesting. Was this a real effect or a placebo effect that they knew restoration had happened and they thought it had changed the river? But everyone seems in favor of it now.
Laurent: What about the water safety? I know some examples in the Netherlands where it was improved after restoration for farming. Is it a bit the same in this area or not?
Rachel: There's a lot of anecdotal evidence for this, but I don't know how much research has been done. There's one site I know of where he's got cattle on over the summer and we're getting much drier, hotter summers now where we're more likely to get droughts. And he just doesn't have to worry because now we know there's water there. By re-wetting, we are sort of creating a bit more of a water source for livestock on the mountain in the summer.
Mike: In the UK, a lot of our drinking water does come from the uplands and it does come from peatland catchments. I'm not sure re-wetting has had any effect on that, but there's more water in the landscape.
Laurent: How does the restoration method look like technically?
Rachel: It often looks slightly messy while you're actually up there. It almost always involves getting excavators up there, and these can be anything up to 13 tonnes. They're usually not quite that big, but it depends on the job. Ditches, they block them usually with peat. We're quite lucky in Snowdonia where we can just use peat from on site rather than having to bring extra materials in. Peat hags again, just moving the peat around to flatten it out and tease out the vegetation to revegetate. Things like covering bare peat, we actually do take material up there to help cover the bare peat and then reseed it. There's always machines involved, either transporting things or physically manipulating the peat up there. They're low ground pressure and they also have what they call bog mats to spread the weight even more. A small quad bike ATV will make more of a mess than these massive machines.
Jess: The peat hags, are those unique to this site or this region?
Rachel: Well, they are terms that we use in the UK. One other word for peat hag is a gruff, and they are kind of unique to peatlands. Probably more found on blanket bogs. So we've got a lot of blanket bogs here in the UK. Gullies are the start of streams. They will eventually turn into streams that cut down to the mineral or bedrock, at which point we can't block them. A bit like a creek on a salt marsh, but the top of the stream coming down.
Mike: Blanket bogs are a bit of an anomaly and unknown to much of the rest of the world. Norway has some, Russia has some, the Falklands have some. They're most of our bogs and they are quite different because they're in the uplands, so they have these features that you wouldn't get on a lowland raised bog or a Scandinavian Maya or a swamp or the other kind of peatlands we have about the world.
Jess: How long does it take until the site starts reseeding itself and it doesn't need that new plant transplant?
Rachel: When I first started about seven years ago, we said if there's any sort of natural plumps already there within about a meter squared, it'll probably cover that area itself eventually. Where you've got big flat areas of bare peat or sides of hags which you've not been able to cover with the vegetation that's already there, it just needs a helping hand because it's going to take a heck of a lot of time to reseed. Generally, like the side of a hag or sort of quite open area, sphagnum doesn't always work. So we might be going in there with a grass seed, which is not necessarily typical peatland vegetation, but it will provide cover for the peatland vegetation to establish. Or you could go in with individual plugs of specific peatland plants.
One other option that we've not tried yet, but they are trialing out in Yorkshire, Northern England, is hydro seeding. You literally get like a powder, mix it with some water, and in that powder you've got a very specific mix of seeds, in this case peatland seeds, and then what they call a brash mix. So you can have different types of brash mix, which basically helps it stick. And then you don't need to worry about the material and what seeds you've got and like whether that grass will facilitate the cotton grass and all that. You just spray it on and leave it. And they've had quite a lot of success with that. We've got some quite difficult to reach sites on the sides of mountains, so that would be ideal for us. So we're researching that at the moment, hopefully to do next winter.
Laurent: Do you target some kind of pioneer sphagnum species or grass species in the restoration program? Or it's more like the optimal one directly that you bring on site?
Rachel: To be honest, we don't actually do that much in terms of bare peat, because what bare peat we have, we can usually cover with the existing vegetation. But when we do, we've just used generic upland grass seed, which will then help the peatland species come along. Lots of other areas in the UK do specific plugs of plants. Sometimes it's sphagnum, if you've got the right hummocks and pools and stuff for them. Sometimes it is actually planting things like cotton and grass. Sometimes people literally just use heather brush or grass brush with seeds in it. As long as you've got that cover and it will eventually come back. It can take a few years, though.
Laurent: I imagine if the landscape evolves, you can have different birds, different kind of animals living there.
Rachel: Yeah, to be honest, they respond quite well to the hydrological restoration, and it can be really quick. Literally, we block the ditches, create pools, whatever we're doing. The next summer, we'll have loads of frogs and dragonflies and all sorts of things. We work quite closely with the RSPB. They work with birds a lot and they see increases in certain bird species as well. We haven't always seen results, but yeah, it's always encouraging to see things coming back to site really quickly.
Mike: There's some really cool work from elsewhere in Wales showing that following re-wetting of these blanket bogs, you get a lot more crane flies, their daddy longlegs. The base of the ecosystem, if you have more crane flies, you have more of everything else right up to your larger birds and things. It's really encouraging.
Jess: What are some of the things that you're measuring at this site?
Mike: On the Migneint re-wetting site, we're looking at terrestrial and aquatic emissions of the various greenhouse gases, methane, carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide. The key things we're interested in, and we hope that this re-wetting will lead to more carbon being locked up in the bog. Peatlands are one of our most important global carbon stores. But at the same time, we know that re-wetting, if we have more water that will lead to more methane being emitted. That's what wetlands do, emit methane, we can't blame them for emitting methane. A healthy wetland emits methane. But we do need to sort of quantify the magnitude of that methane emission to try and understand it. So that's at the moment one of the main aims of our project. There's modelling from elsewhere in Europe that shows even if we do have these spikes of methane after re-wetting, in the long term, the carbon that's locked up will outlive that methane because methane is such a short-lived greenhouse gas. We're also interested in the dissolved carbon within the water, the sort of brown colour of the water. A lot of these bogs used for drinking water. Water companies have to remove that color so we can find natural ways to make the water less colored to remove some of that carbon. That's a win as well.
Laurent: Can you put an economical values on this greenhouse gases sequestration or this avoidance of the DOC export?
Rachel: Looking at the Peatland Code, there's a very simple looking spreadsheet behind which is all of that data that Mike's collecting and others. So it does tie into carbon credits. And they're quite sort of holistic, they do include all of these carbon metrics. When a project goes through the Peatland Code, you essentially have the pre-restoration state emitting X amount of carbon. Then with your restoration plan, you have your post-restoration state and that project is a minimum of 30 years. That sort of ties in with how long methane sticks around in the atmosphere. That difference between your pre-restoration state and your post-restoration state should be producing less carbon. That difference is your carbon credits so you can sell at different points in the project. You can sell them up front as a promise of carbon or you can sell them as you go along, banking five years or 10 years at a time. Or you can sort of keep them yourself. The value of those changes because it's a bit like a stock market then. I couldn't give you an exact figure, but when I started it was about 4 to 6 pounds per ton. The last couple of years it's been quite a bit more than that because there's quite a lot of demand for it. It's quite hard to put an actual price on these things.
Laurent: Is there a directly a mechanism allowing to fund the restoration program with this or it's more like a gradual compensation with the carbon markets?
Rachel: It can be either. You can fund it entirely from selling your carbon credits, but obviously you'd have to then sell quite a few upfront as that promise of carbon. Most projects will use other funding for the actual restoration work. I'm not saying what we've done in the past, we've used project funding, usually from a Welsh government project to actually fund the restoration. And then the sale of the carbon credits has been for funding the maintenance. of the works. For example, if like dams break off to pay for surveys and costs going on for that 30 years, carbon credits have to cover a minimum of 15% of the total project costs and it can cover up to 100%.
Laurent: How are the local stakeholders perceiving that? Can also a farmer decide, oh, I raise my groundwater level and I stop farming on some part of the landscape and just get the same kind of fundings?
Rachel: Not all Welsh sites are eligible, because they're often small or maybe don't have deep enough peat, so not enough to do there. Also, a lot of landowners don't like the idea of being tied in for 30 years. Generally, they're pretty happy with what we do, because they say it's not their productive land. Now, if we were to go along and say, right, we're going to mess about with your really productive fields, then that would be a different question, which is where high-modified peat might be a bit of a problem coming up. But on the uplands, as long as we can prove we're not going to alter the way they can work the land, generally they're on board. We do often have to build in extras, like big enough dams for quad bikes to go across and things like that, and making sure we're not flooding loads of areas. But it depends on the landowner. Sometimes they actually want all those extra pools. It's just an ongoing dialogue with each landowner as to how far they want to go and where we can go with it.
Jess: I'm also curious, how many people did it take to restore the site? Are we talking like a team of 10s of people or like hundreds?
Rachel: At the park, there's three of us. But the site that Mark worked on there were two main offices there, we bring in contractors. I think they had three digger drivers there, which is about right for the sort of jobs we do.
Laurent: Do you sometimes observe trade-off between ecosystem services occurring during the restoration? With your diversity that is changing, maybe not good or bad, but maybe something different from the more mature landscape, fully restored.
Mike: We can manage these landscapes, these peatlands, for certain things. It's very hard to manage them so they're good for everything. The RSPB, the Royal Society for the Protective Birds, who do a lot of restoration. When they restore, they like a lot of open water because the birds that are trying to bring back curlews and golden plovers like the open water. We know from our research that it's the open water that is contributing much of the methane. So I suppose to some extent it depends on our values and what we want. Do we want more keystone biodiversity in the landscape and accept a little bit more methane, which is what wetlands produce anyway, as a sort of disservice and say that we have the curlews there and that's a good thing anyway. It depends to some extent who's funding the restoration and what their goals are.
Laurent: Do you mobilize the stakeholders to determine a bit which direction between these different objectives?
Mike: I mean, I suppose the end point is we find a nice middle ground. Some people have preliminary data that shows if we have more floating sphagnum in these pools, that will capture and oxidize the methane. So maybe we can manage the landscape to optimize for multiple things if we have the scientific understanding to do that. But certainly sphagnum seems a great way to mitigate some of these methane emissions, but still have the open water.
Laurent: In terms of flux, how do you share your results with stakeholders? Peatlands are not simple ecosystems, I would say. So how challenging is it to communicate to your stakeholders?
Mike: I mean, it will depend on the site and the people. The National Trust own most of the land that I'm working on. They conserve landscapes and old buildings and all sorts of things. And they are interested in the results. They have a peatland officer who works on the peatlands, who understands these things. So they are keen to find out what we're doing and they're very keen that we're working up there. It's convenient for us because we have site access, but they do want the data. I'm not sure that they'll ever read the papers, but they want the findings distilled down, certainly.
Rachel: The peatland community in the UK, it's expanding. but it's never been massive and we're all quite sort of geeky about it. So we all love to get together and chat about these things. I certainly find that in Wales as well on the practitioner side. If someone's doing some research, everyone's really keen to know what the results are and things. In terms of the actual landowners, it's a right mix. Some of them are genuinely interested and quite scientific themselves. They're all curious as to what's actually happened up there. You just have to pitch at different levels because they're not always interested in the high level science, but they do want to know what's happened.
Jess: I'm also curious about bringing the students to the bog sites that you're researching or places that you maybe aren't collecting any data from. What kinds of projects do you do to keep them interested, but also that you can show them in a brief amount of time?
Mike: At Liverpool, I've been quite lucky in that. I've got a few modules with field components. We take our master's students out to a bog for the day, let them talk to the people who manage the site and hear sort of what goes into restoring the bog. This is one that the restoration started in the 1970s, and it's still not fixed. It's a really tricky site to fix, so they get this long-term perspective of how difficult it is to fix a bog from the people who have been doing it for a long time. And then we sort of go across the site, we look at the water chemistry in the pools, we take some peat cores. If students have never seen a peat core being taken before, it's quite an exciting thing to do. To see a huge peat core emerge from the ground and say, this is 1000 years old, and down at the bottom you can see this species of sphagnum that used to be here, now it's extinct, but it's still there in the record. And we also use some of the field sites with our master's students, our undergrad students, when it comes to their dissertations. They'll have a research project. We'll sort of introduce them to the site. They will go off collecting data. We leave them to it sometimes for a week. They'll stay in the local area. We've generated some really cool publishable data from undergrad and master's student dissertations. It's really good. They get to do real research and contribute to papers. And we get extra people collecting data. It's win-win.
Jess: Are there like citizen volunteers or because the sites, you know, already restored, is there not a lot for them to do?
Mike: Part of the ECO-WADE project is a little bit of citizen science component where across Europe at the different sites, people are installing rust rods into the ground. So these are rods of iron and you put them into the ground and they will oxidize at the water table depth. Part of the rationale for putting these into the project, it's a really bulk measurement of the water table every year, but you can take school groups out to the field and show them this and talk to them in a way that they can understand. Some of the partner teams have already deployed theirs got school groups involved. We've not done it in the Migneint yet, but there are rust rods up there already in place.
Rachel: I took a bunch of primary school and elementary school kids out from the village right below the Migneint, and a lot of their parents were the farmers on the Migneint. And it was great because we were just introducing them to the peatlands and they knew it all. They knew all the plants, all the Welsh names. Brilliant. Yeah, so we've often taken school kids out of loads of different ages and we often have volunteers out helping us check our works and helping us survey and things like that. So it's a great way of getting everyone involved.
Laurent: How do you share then the results of this citizen science with your public? Basically, do you organize after a follow up or you just send some kind of free reports to the participants.
Jess: To follow up with the elementary schoolers, you'd have to wait 20 years and see if they end up going to grad school.
Rachel: For those, it's just about giving them an experience and teaching them about peatlands. Even with the adult volunteers that come out with this, they won't know everything about peatlands. And then sometimes we'll follow up with like a post on social media saying, oh, we surveyed this many dams or whatever. But that's as far as it goes. It's more about what happens on the day with the stuff that I do. But I'm not specifically collecting data with about surveying and having a nice time.
Laurent: How do you deal actually with the different time scale? Because usually your project will have a few years lifetime, but definitely the restoration is really for decades, like you mentioned earlier. How do you deal with that with the communication?
Mike: With this project, I designed it this way. So the site we have this project on is the site that I did my PhD on, which was started in 2009. We've revisited the same sites, we're sampling the same ditches, we're sampling the same terrestrial bog, even though we don't have a continuous record from them. We have breaks, obviously, but we're picking up the same story now, 2026. We're moving into the sort of, dare I say, medium term response. And we know that's really important because often in the short term is when you get these spikes of methane, it takes longer for sphagnum to colonize. We do need those long-term perspectives. That's the key. You can't make policy on what happens a year after we've done some restoration work.
Rachel: You can't just restore a peat bog on one visit. You've got to go back and do this stuff and the other. And it's why the peatland code is sort of built over 30 years and you've got to have all the ongoing maintenance as part of it. Now, the grants that we all work on now, they're sort of one, two, three years at a time, but it's still built with that knowledge that it takes a long time.
Jess: You know, in the US, some of our national parks are so popular that they have to like raffle off tickets and stuff like that. Do you have these kinds of issues with your national park where it's so popular, you've got to tell tourists we can't handle so many people walking across this bog or bringing in potentially invasive species or all the negative effects that humans can have just going to a place.
Mike: I mean, within the national park as a whole, there are, too many people camping in vans at roadsides, I think is a fair thing to say. Popular mountains are really busy. There's not enough parking spaces. On the bog, there's no one there. Even though we're in the national park, yeah, I mean, in all the times I've been up there, I've seen one group of hikers. There are not very many paths. It's very bleak and desolate country. I think it's fantastic, but it's not, to your average tourist, a pretty environment. It's a peatland. There's a reason peatlands have been ignored and treated as wastelands for a long time because they're not attractive to your everyday day tripper, I guess.
Rachel: On a broader scale, obviously I work on more than just the Migneint, but the majority of them are like that. They're in the quieter parts of the park. The more popular areas tend to be the bigger mountains, the rockier areas, the sort of the honeypot sites. So yeah, from a peatland perspective, we kind of get away with it. There are places where we have to be careful about eroding footpaths. Down in South Wales, the Brecon Beacons, for example, that's they've got loads of peatlands Everybody just walks on them. Same with Peak District in Northern England. But we're quite lucky in Snowdonia National Park in that most of our peatlands are kind of out of the way. The national park here is a working landscape. It is still quite busy. We might not have tourists, but we might have quite heavy farming going on instead, and that's a different issue. We do still have to manage tourist numbers in our busier spots, mostly due to parking. We do have camp spots, but you're not really allowed to wild camp on the mountains here. People do, but they shouldn't.
Laurent: How are these restored sites reacting to the global change compared to the non-restorative one? Do you see a difference?
Mike: I don't think we've observed any differences, though it would probably take longer to test and observe any differences. I mean, we know things like dissolved organic carbon, that brown color in our peatland water has been increasing for decades because of recovery from acid rain, and now it's increasing because of climate change. It will probably continue to increase. There's evidence that if you restore a bog, there will be less of that organic carbon coming out of it. So I would hope that in the long term we will start to see an effect, but we haven't yet.
Rachel: That sort of long-term resilience is built into our restoration plans. Where we can, where the landowner is okay with it, we'll sort of go above and beyond. We work as much as we can just to sort of build that resilience to the predicted drier, hotter summers and wildfire risk and flashy rain in the winters. It's a really tricky one to measure right now.
Jess: What are your future plans for your research or for the restoration of the site?
Mike: I mean, I'm hopeful that I can continue working on this blanket bog for quite a long time. Really excitingly, in the last few months, the site got accepted by an organization called the Ecological Continuity Trust, which sort of ensures long-term monitoring sites become formalized into this umbrella. There's little pots of money to renew equipment and for monitoring. So I would hope that, fingers crossed, in another 20 years, I will still have some research interests up there and we can move into those long-term responses to peatland rewetting and restoration.
Rachel: Any stage of restoration, the first step is the hydrological restoration, which is what they're working on now. Then it's sustainable management. We would probably want some sort of conservation grazing on there. Practically at the moment that would probably be sheep, but it would ideally be cattle. The farmers in the valley did do a trial up there with cattle, but it was quite a small scale short-term trial, so they didn't get any conclusive results. But elsewhere people have used cattle and it's worked quite well on the uplands. So they're quite keen to try another trial at some point. You can now also get these collars, you can put on the cattle and basically control where they are from your phone. You set up boundaries and stuff, so it means you don't need any fences on the ground as well. There's loads of ways forward with sustainably managing these sites. It's just going to take time for it to settle out and become properly restored.