High-Resolution Monitoring of Eco-hydrological Changes Following Rewetting of European Peatlands – Bridging Earth Observation and Restoration Practices

In Europe, approximately 52 % of former peatland area is strongly degraded due to human exploitation. This makes the EU the worlds’ second largest emitter of greenhouse gases from drained peatlands. Rewetting of drained peatland sites has therefore a great climate change mitigation potential, as net greenhouse gas emissions can be strongly reduced in the long term. To assess the success of rewetting actions, there is a strong demand for cost-effective and unified monitoring techniques. With the aid of cloud-based remote sensing, the field of earth observation has quickly improved in terms of data accessability and handling, which facilitates the development of individual open-access solutions for environmental monitoring, and may therefore provide suitable tools to monitor peatland rewetting.

We developed a tool to assess the status and changes of peatlands in terms of vegetation and moisture conditions. Therefore, time-series of vegetation and moisture indices (such as NDVI, NDWI) based on freely available satellite data (such as Landsat) were compiled, which provide spatially and temporally continuous information on changes in peatland ecosystems for the last decades.
Anomalies were calculated with reference to the known pre-rewetting time period of selected peatlands, and pre- and post-rewetting trends were analyzed. This provides a spatio-temporal overview of eco-hydrologic changes at individual user-defined peatland sites, which allows deriving information even for remote locations and inaccessable or protected areas. In this contribution we exemplary focus on a rewetted peatland in Northwestern Germany (Neustaedter Moor) for which we could show a clear signal in NDWI anomalies following a rewetting measure in 2013, indicating that these measures have indeed been effective.

We intend to test the application further at multiple sites in cooperation with practitioners and to assess the analysis by comparing results to field-specific data. The fully automatized multi-index approach is provided as a web-based application, which can be used to summarize and compare the advances in peatland restoration at continental scale also in the future. We aim to provide opportunities for new insights by creating synergies between earth observation and restoration practice in European Peatlands.

This research was funded through the 2020-2021 Biodiversa+ and Water JPI joint call for research projects, under the BiodivRestore ERA-NET Cofund (GA N°101003777), with the EU and the funding organisations DFG (Germany), FWF (Austria), NSC (Poland) and the LNV (The Netherlands)