Satellite Earth Observation (EO) is often used as a cost-effective method to report on the condition of remote and inaccessible peatland areas. Current EO techniques are primarily limited to reporting on the vegetation classes and properties of the immediate peat surface using optical data, which can be used to infer peatland condition. Another useful indicator of peatland condition is that of surface motion, which has the potential to report on mass accumulation and loss of peat. Interferometic SAR (InSAR) techniques can provide this using data from space. However, the most common InSAR techniques for information extraction, such as Persistent Scatterers’ Interferometry (PSI), have seen limited application over peat as they are primarily tuned to work in areas of high coherence (i.e., on hard, non-vegetated surfaces only). A new InSAR technique, called the Intermittent Small BAseline Subset (ISBAS) method, has been recently developed to provide measurements over vegetated areas from SAR data acquired by satellite sensors. This paper examines the feasibility of the ISBAS technique for monitoring long-term surface motion over peatland areas of the Flow Country, in the northeast of Scotland. In particular, the surface motions estimated are compared with ground data over a small forested area (namely the Bad a Cheo forest Reserve). Two sets of satellite SAR data are used: ERS C-band images, covering the period 1992–2000, and Sentinel-1 C-band images, covering the period 2015–2016. We show that the ISBAS measurements are able to identify surface motion over peatland areas, where subsidence is a consequence of known land cover/land use. In particular, the ISBAS products agree with the trend of surface motion, but there are uncertainties with their magnitude and direction (vertical). It is concluded that there is a potential for the ISBAS method to be able to report on trends in subsidence and uplift over peatland areas, and this paper suggests avenues for further investigation, but this requires a well-resourced validation campaign.

There is growing interest in the restoration of blanket bogs that were afforested during the 1960s to 1980s, to avoid further loss of carbon to the atmosphere and to regain and defragment important blanket bog habitat. This paper reports the findings from a ten-year experiment in the UK to test the effectiveness of restoration treatments on water table depth, peat bulk density and water content, ground surface height and vegetation development. Treatments used were the six combinations of damming or not damming plough furrows with leaving the trees alive, felling and leaving them on the ground or felling and removing them. Combining felling with damming furrows was most successful in raising the water table, whether or not the felled trees were removed. Only where felling was combined with damming did the water table continue to recover between Years 5 and 10. Over ten years, the water level in these treatments rose to slightly below that of non-afforested reference bog at the same sites. This occurred as a rapid initial rise, following which there was only very slight further improvement. Felling caused the species composition of the vegetation to change towards that of the reference bogs. The process was slow, with the vegetation becoming more dissimilar to non-forested reference bog in the first five years and then becoming more similar to the reference bog after Year 5. Surprisingly, damming plough furrows had little effect on the vegetation except that, in combination with felling, it increased differentiation between the plough furrows and other positions on the ploughed ground. Conifer seedlings established on the restored plots, most densely where they adjoined standing forest, and had similar density and growth in all the felled treatments. The restoration treatments resulted in a decrease in bulk density and increase in water content of the upper peat, probably due to an unloading effect caused by the raised water table buoying up the drained peat layer. In some treatments this was amplified by removal of the weight of the trees. Damming the plough furrows caused a 5–7 cm rise in ground surface height, suggesting that subsidence resulting from primary consolidation and secondary compression is at least partly reversible.

The Flow Country blanket bogs in the counties of Caithness and Sutherland (northern Scotland, UK) harbour internationally important populations of specialist open-bog breeding bird species. However, commercial afforestation carried out in the 1980s, involving the non-native tree species lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) and sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) covering over 67,000 hectares (ca. 17 %) of the peatland, has significantly affected bird assemblages within and around the plantations. We conducted a literature review to identify the avian winners and losers resulting from this transformation. Our synthesis of existing findings confirms that afforestation has led to changes in the availability of breeding and foraging habitat, alterations in inter- and intra-specific competition dynamics, and the creation of forest edge effects. Crucially, the open-bog bird assemblages have been largely replaced by woodland specialists and generalists. While 33 species (including five Red-listed Birds of Conservation Concern) are observed to benefit from afforestation, these gains are arguably of lower conservation value than the original open-bog assemblages (27 species including 11 Red-listed species). As a mean proportion of the British population range, the Flow Country has a significantly higher proportion of Amber and Green-listed loser species than winners. Understanding the changes in assemblages is crucial for informing future decisions regarding forest planting and re-planting, particularly in the context of the ongoing dual challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss. Further research is necessary to comprehend the effects of afforestation on populations of waterfowl associated with open water features present in the blanket bog landscape. Given the need for woodland creation, bird conservation would benefit from leaving naturally open habitats intact and siting new woodland in areas that were formerly naturally forested.

Peatlands store approximately one-third of the world’s soil carbon (C), but their functioning is highly variable at fine spatial scales due to differences in vegetation cover and environmental conditions such as water table depth. This fine-scale heterogeneity plays a key role in carbon dynamics yet capturing it—particularly in relation to green leaf phenology (GLP)—is challenging with traditional remote sensing methods. To address this, we developed a smartphone-based methodology and community-science project called the PeatPic Project. We gathered over 3700 photographs from 27 sites across 10 countries in 2021 and 2022, representing different peatland types (bog, fen, and swamp), at 1–2 week intervals. We calculated GLP metrics, such as the data of the start of the season and end of the season, based on the red-blue-green bands from these photographs. We found that GLP metrics varied significantly across peatland types and dominant vegetation communities. Notably, peak greenness at bog sites occurring approximately 10 days later in the year compared to fen sites. Furthermore, variables relation to peatland/vegetation type and energy balance were key predictors of peatland GLP. The PeatPic Project’s readily available methodology offers low-cost opportunities for further research into peatland phenology, enabling the calculation of additional phenological indices and integration with other data types. By refining our understanding of peatland GLP, we can improve predictive C modelling and better assess the impacts of future changes on these important ecosystems.

Forests are often considered to be able to play a significant role in tackling global warming. To fully understand their potential in mitigating climate change and to develop more accurate ecosystem GHG flux budgets and process-based models of forests, we require more knowledge of methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) exchange in forests, their underlying processes, environmental controls and responses to forest management. In recent years, it is becoming evident that not only soils but also the trees themselves may significantly contribute to CH4 and N2O fluxes in forest ecosystems.Our research mainly focussed on greenhouse gas (GHG) exchange in temperate UK forests on both mineral and organic soils. We will primarily concentrate on CH4 fluxes as N2O fluxes were often relatively low in these forests and, by including CO2 fluxes, we will put them into the context of the overall ecosystem GHG exchange. A range of flux methods at different scales were used in our field studies to be able to capture the often high temporal and spatial variability of the GHG exchange between the atmosphere and either soils, tree stems or entire trees aboveground, and to identify potential drivers of the fluxes. The impact of management practices including clear fell, drainage and the resulting micro-topography, and forest-to-bog restoration on CH4 fluxes from organic soils following the first forest rotation will also be described. We regularly used novel automated and chamber approaches and technologies, and the advantages and limitations of the different flux approaches and their use to upscale fluxes to the landscape scale will be evaluated.