Six years of changing open-water cover across the peatlands of the Western Siberian Lowlands

The Western Siberian Lowland (WSL) is the world’s largest peatland complex, containing vast areas of permafrost and non-permafrost peatland. Peatlands of the WSL feature extensive surface water cover. These pools play important roles in aquatic biodiversity and biogeochemical cycling, particularly of carbon, but are thought to be changing in response to climate. Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellite data are currently under-utilised for spatiotemporal peatland monitoring at large spatial scales. We analysed changing open-water cover across the WSL from Sentinel-1 SAR imagery. Our research illustrates the highly dynamic systems behaviour across the WSL with inter-year inundation dynamics observed. The cloud-computing basis of our method gives it clear potential for monitoring high-latitude regions. This potential will be realised through the recently funded NERC project, Antheia, which we also introduce here. Antheia will quantify recent and ongoing changes in northern peatland pools at a hemispheric scale and identify the drivers of change.