When environmental engineering PhD student Pouya Ghezelayagh visited peatlands in Norway to measure them, he almost passed out from the cold, snowy conditions. However, he had a better time traversing the spongy peatlands in the Biebrza Valley, Poland, which has been his most recent place of study.
Perhaps due to his experiences in the field, Ghezelayagh, who works for the Warsaw University of Life Sciences, has been working on a tool to measure peatlands remotely through satellite imagery instead. His work falls under the EU-funded WET HORIZONS project, which aims to better understand peatlands and subsequently rewet them.
Peatlands are unique ecosystems that are home to many rare and threatened species found nowhere else. The world’s peatlands store twice as much carbon as the world’s forests, despite peatlands covering only around 3% of the Earth’s surface. Similarly, peatlands can help reduce flooding.
Ghezelayagh wanted to test whether the subsidence rate of peatlands – how quickly the peatlands sink in – could act as a proxy for how much carbon they’re emitting. “We tried to introduce an assessment tool for estimating peat carbon emissions from satellite imagery without needing to go there and measure the sites,” said Ghezelayagh.
Peatlands are unique ecosystems that are home to many rare and threatened species found nowhere else
The method is based around a technique called INSAR, where a satellite takes a picture of the same spot at different times. Between these different data points, you’re able to see how things have changed over time. However, in developing his model Ghezelayagh had to account for things like cloudy days. The results of his work were published in a paper in the Scientific Reports (Nature Portfolio) in October.
Ghezelayagh’s tool is one of many being developed under the WET HORIZONS banner. Whereas his focuses on measuring change, the ServiPeat tool is one that encourages people to actively change their land. Designed as a decision support system for landowners, ServiPeat helps to make rewetting peatlands easier. An old version of the tool is available online with a new one due to be published in December.
By putting in information about the land, users would get advice on what actions could be taken to rewet the land. Alongside that, the tool would provide details on how much carbon could be stored, the biodiversity benefits, and an estimation of the costs, among other things. “If the user wants to have more accurate results, it needs to be tailored to specific sites,” said Marta Stachowicz, an assistant researcher working on the tool together with Professor Mateusz Grygoruk the founder of ServiPeat at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences.
If a user had ditches on their site that they wanted to rewet, for example, the tool would provide information on how many ditches would need to be rewetted to consider the change a successful restoration.
The European Commission’s strategy on biodiversity involves peatland restoration and strict protection by 2030. Only 10% of Europe’s peatlands are in good condition, though the Nature Restoration Law, entered into force in August 2024, has binding restoration targets for all ecosystems including peatlands. By 2030, those targets should cover 20% of the EU’s land and sea areas.
The European Commission’s strategy on biodiversity involves peatland restoration and strict protection by 2030
“Peatland restoration is now a hot topic, but uncertainties remain and stakeholders still express doubts about the benefits and costs,” said Stachowicz. The ServiPeat tool was designed to address these uncertainties by making the benefits and costs more digestible for landowners.
ServiPeat is tailored to European data, so it would be most useful in that context. So far, Stachowitz has tested the new version of the tool at various sites in Poland which were previously drained for agricultural use. “We know from the statistics that the old version was used mostly in Poland, but sometimes in China too,” she said.
After the new tool is published in December, Stachowitz hopes to expand the user base to other European countries like the Netherlands and Germany – and she already has meetings lined up with fitting stakeholders. Right now, the platform is only available in Polish and English, though she wants to provide more language options going into the future.
ServiPeat is just one tool in the rewetting process. Stachowitz made it clear that users would have to do their own monitoring and modelling onsite throughout the process, and the tool is very much still a work in progress. “What would be very useful is feedback from the users after they test it for themselves – that gives us the best idea what could be improved and what could be added,” she said.
The data fed into the ServiPeat tool comes from other parts of the WET HORIZON project, making it an overall collaborative effort – although Ghezelayagh’s work is separate and complementary. Such technologies that can make peatland restoration more cost-effective and appealing could bring Europe strides further in protecting peatlands, some of which have been around for tens of thousands of years.
