RePEAT Project

Welcome to the main page of the RePEAT project

The Idea:

In the early 1800s, according to the Bog Commissioner Reports, Irish peatlands were mostly intact. These reports were the result of a large-scale survey of Irish peatlands between 1810 and 1814. Britain commissioned the survey of over one million acres of bogs in Ireland, producing detailed maps and estimates of their extent and depth (Ruuskanen, 2018) (Figure 1). The Commissioner’s Report on the Nature and Extent of Bogs in Ireland (1810-1814) represents the first inventory of a natural ecosystem in Ireland, and likely one of the most detailed assessments of an ecosystem at this scale in the world at the time. Between 1814 and the 1940s, much of the degradation and land use change is likely to have been related to draining the bogs to ‘improve’ the land for agricultural use (Carroll-Burke, 2002). This ‘improvement’ has led to the development of a spatially complex heterogenous landscape where peatlands, and affected their stock of organic carbon, that has undergone change over the last 200 years. The peatland soil organic stock in those area is now masked by surface vegetation and land use. This complex landscape makes the exercise of mapping peatlands, whether by ground survey, earth observation or a combination of both, much more difficult. The reason for this is that many peatlands are “hidden” by the surface vegetation which could a grassland or forestry.

Aim:

The aim of the RePEAT project is to extract information about the baseline extent of peatlands in Ireland from accurate historic maps (the Bog Commissioner’s Maps) from the early 1800s. These data will be used to accurately locate and identify agricultural areas located on peat soils. This will facilitate national rewetting projects to reduce GHG emissions from these areas.

Objectives:

The RePEAT project objectives are to:

1) Review literature to determine best approaches and the state of the art.

2) Digitally extract baseline peatland boundary data from the Bog Commissioner maps.

3) Assess the accuracy of the Bog Commissioner maps using empirical field data.

4) Use advanced geospatial and earth observation techniques to conduct a change detection study to identify the area of converted peatlands and to quantify the area of grasslands located on those former peatlands.

5) Identify areas that may be suitable for rewetting under the Climate Action Plan.

6) Refine estimates of GHG emissions from these converted peatlands.

Extent