SER AWARE workshop: Is resilience useful in fen restoration and should scientists explain things to idiots?

Between the 21: st and 23: rd of April the Conservation and Restoration research group at the department of Plant Ecology at Warsaw University hosted the Society for Ecological Restorations workshop on fen restoration. Many prominent experts on peatland vegetation and peatland restoration were key-note speakers at the work-shop.

There were many interesting talks, but I am here going to focus on two debates that occurred:

·         Does resilience have any value for peatland restoration?

·         Should scientists actively engage in influencing policy, or just present the facts?

Resilience thinking has had a profound influence on ecology during the last years. For restoration, restoring for resilience would mean that we perform a restoration action that creates a resilient system that does not need any further funding in terms of maintenance. For fen restoration the problem is that the restored system is in most cases not resilient, but in a state that is somewhere between the degraded state and the natural state. Left alone it will often revert back to a more degraded state.

On the contrary a heavily degraded fen is often very resilient (which is the very reason why fen restoration is so hard).

Richard Hobbs has stated that resilience brings ”conceptual muddling”. Personally I am not sure it is so unclear what is referred to, but it´s questionable how useful resilience is in terms of fen restoration. There are definitely natural peatlands that are resilient. Bogs are resilient, whereas a fen can easily switch into a bog once Sphagnum starts to drive the rich fen-poor fen-bog transformation. If a resilient system was the aim, you may very well end up arguing that a species poor bog is better than a rich fen.

The debate about whether or not scientists should use their knowledge to influence policy even if it means compromising surprised me. For me it is very clear that scientists have a moral duty to the tax payers who fund them, and to future generations, to make the scientific knowledge clear to policy makers, and yes we will have to accept that sometimes compromises are necessary. One speaker at the work-shop was however very much against this idea and stated ”Our job as scientist is to tell the truth, not to explain things to idiots”.  There are indeed plenty of stupid politicians, and it is understandable that some scientists would rather do research and teach students than engage in year-long struggles to make the scientific knowledge useful for the society at large.

Where would we be if it wasn´t for scientists who never gave up “explaining things to idiots”?

If it wasn´t for James Hansen´s long work with making the scientific findings of climate-science reach further than the readers of a journal, we would still be at the state were knowledge about global warming would be very limited among the public.

If it wasn´t for peatland scientists in Poland and other Europeans nations who fought for more than 10 years to save the Rospuda valley, many of them spending nights sleeping in the trees to prevent the destruction, the Rospuda valleys fens would not have been saved. Instead of a large fen in a natural state, there would be a highway cutting through the fen, with pillars driven through the several meter thick waterlogged peat, running the risk of severe drainage with subsequent biodiversity loss and massive release of stored carbon.

These two examples illustrate painful struggles that in the end have reached important victories, giving tax payers the best value for the research that they have funded. In the real world, the rule “no pain – no gain” is often a rule we have to accept.

That sinking feeling: CO2 emission after fen drainage substantial

A new paper by Leifeld et al. 2011 calculates the amount of carbon lost from a temperate peatland after drainage. A convenient method of estimating the amount of carbon lost has previously been to assume that it is roughly 50% of the total amount of volume lost, but the authors show that this can vary a lot even within the narrow climate zone of their study in Switzerland. After drainage, water goes out, and the ground subsides. Part of it is due to simply the fact that the water is lost and the peat is compressed. The other part is due to oxidation of the organic matter, that previously had been preserved in the very anoxic condition (think bogmen).

The authors show that in their fen that was drained 140 years ago, the annual subsidence of the ground has been 0,8-1,6 cm per year. So what does this mean for carbon loss. Well, it turns out that the amount of lost carbon is between 2,5-5,5 metric ton annually per hectare. Now assuming that the one who drained the peatland would have to pay for these emissions we would have to multiply the amount of C with 3,7 to get the amount of CO2. We are here making the assumption that all C go out as CO2. Then we end up with an annual release of 8,25-18.15 ton CO2 per hectare. Offsetting that CO2 would today cost roughly 53-117 euro per hectare annually. Considering that the amount of drained peatlands in the world are large (think Netherlands), it ends up being quite a lot. Hopefully we can be able to turn these carbon sources back to carbon sinks by restoring them, but unfortunately it is not always successful. One of the most important lessons of this is therefore to conserve the functioning peatlands we have. It is also of importance to not allow further drainage. In Sweden forestry owners are allowed to restore the ditch to the original depth, which is false thinking. The peatland has subsided since the drainage, and therefore making the ditch as deep as it was originally will take it even further down into the peat. It ought to be self evident that FSC forestry should not include “ditch-rinsing” but unfortunately it is allowed.

Leifeld, J., Müller, M., & Fuhrer, J. (2011). Peatland subsidence and carbon loss from drained temperate fens Soil Use and Management DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-2743.2011.00327.x