Identifying and monitoring sustainable, climate-resilient management alternatives for UK lowland peatland using remote sensing

Overview

The Cambridgeshire Fens are a highly fragmented and extensively drained lowland peatland landscape. They cover 4,000 km² and include large areas used for crop production and grazing, ditches and rivers, unproductive highly degraded peat, small reserves of deeper peat, and areas under active restoration. The Fens, like all UK lowland peatlands, have an important role in climate regulation, acting as both sources and sinks for GHGs. Intact peatlands are an important carbon store, but degraded peatlands now account for 3.5% of total UK GHG emissions. Conventional agricultural production in the Cambridgeshire Fens is worth £1.23 billion per year but is driving continued peat degradation. The highly fragmented nature of these peatlands requires decision-making to reduce risks and enhance climate resilience at a landscape scale.

Potential strategies to enhance resilience range from the adoption of more sustainable grazing, crop, soil and water management practices which will reduce the rates of peat erosion, to wetland crop production, and full restoration. While the benefits of peatland restoration are broadly understood, the merits of widespread adoption of more sustainable, regenerative agricultural practices, and the production of wetland crops on peat are less clear. Sustainable agricultural practices include reduced grazing, conservation (zero) tillage which reduces soil mechanical disturbance, winter cover-cropping (for example rye), and raising water tables, but there has been no systematic assessment of their costs/benefits. Paludiculture trials are ongoing in the region, and may ultimately have the potential to replace conventional agricultural production in some areas, although the economics of scaling operations remain to be clarified. Areas of deeper peat are generally considered to be priorities for restoration/conservation, although ongoing degradation and a lack of up-to-date peatland maps means the location of these areas is often anecdotal, and there are financial implications for farmers.

Key to successful outcomes is the development of cost-effective tools for monitoring ongoing peat loss, and adopting a systematic approach to landscape management that can optimise continued agricultural productivity in suitable areas, while identifying areas appropriate for alternative management trajectories. Ultimately such tools are important in the context of schemes like the IUCN peatland code, which is currently being expanded to lowland peatlands in England and Wales, and due to the potential for trading peatland carbon credits in the near future.