Stockholm university

“We mapped the world’s frozen peatlands – what we found was very worrying”

Peatlands cover just a few percent of the global land area but they store almost one-quarter of all soil carbon and so play a crucial role in regulating the climate. Gustaf Hugelius, researcher at Stockholm University, and his colleagues have just produced the most accurate map yet of the world’s peatlands and discusses the results in a new article in The Conversation.

Photo: screenshot The Conversation

The article is published on August 12 and is written by Gustaf Hugelius, Senior Lecturer, Department of Physical Geography, Stockholm University.

He writes: “Peatlands are surprisingly difficult to map as their growth is connected to many different local factors, such as how water drains in the landscape. This meant we had to gather more than 7,000 field observations and use new statistical models based on machine learning to create the maps.

We found that peatlands cover approximately 3.7 million square kilometres. If it were a country, “Peatland” would be slightly larger than India. These peatlands also store approximately 415 gigatons (billion tons) of carbon – as much as is stored in all the world’s forests and trees together.”

Read the article published in The Conversation

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More articles in The Conversation by researchers at Stockholm University

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