Experiments
- Site
- Rävmyran and three paired mires
- Years
- 2019 - present
- Funder
- Nordic Research Council
- Role
- Co-investigator, field lead
3 frames on this sheet
Northern peatlands were ditched at scale for eighty years to grow trees on ground that had never grown them. Some of those ditches are now being blocked, at public expense, on the argument that rewetting returns the peat to a carbon sink. The argument is plausible. The evidence, when we started, was thin.
We hold four paired sites: each pair is one mire left drained and one rewetted in the same year, on the same peat, within a kilometre of each other. Water table, soil temperature and chamber flux are logged half-hourly; vegetation is surveyed each July. The design is deliberately boring, because the question is contested and the answer needs to survive somebody arguing with it.
Six years in, the water table responds within a season and the flux does not. That gap is the finding, and it is not what either side of the debate wanted to hear.
