Researching ecosystem change in Amazonia and Africa
Drs Ed Mitchard, Ian Lawson and Simon Mudd are advertising a PhD position under the SAGES competition. Based in Edinburgh, the student will develop remote-sensing and fieldwork-based approaches to mapping peat properties in the Peruvian Amazon, building on previous work by Draper et al. For more information, see FindAPhd.
A new paper led by Greta Dargie and co-authored by Ian Lawson in Nature reports the existence of 145,000 km2 of peatlands in the Cuvette Centrale of the Congo Basin. We estimate carbon storage at around 31.4 Gt C. This discovery increases the best estimate of carbon storage in tropical peatlands by about 30%. The … Read more
A new paper in Palaeo3 by our group is now online here. The paper, “The vegetation history of an Amazonian domed peatland” by Kelly et al., reports the first pollen record from a domed mire in Amazonia. The record includes the first evidence from the region for discontinuous peat accumulation, which suggests that carbon sequestration … Read more
Ian Lawson and colleagues from the UK Tropical Peat Working Group are organizing a session on “Tropical Peatlands” at EGU in April 2017. The call for abstracts is open with a deadline of 11 January 2017. All submissions welcome! The details of the session are here – the hope is to stimulate comparisons of peatlands … Read more
Ian Lawson has contributed to a blog post for the Journal of Applied Ecology on the impact of the ongoing destruction of Indonesia peatlands on the research community. With SE Asian peatlands rapidly diminishing, the importance of Amazonian and African peatlands as records of tropical environmental and ecological change is heightened. You can read the … Read more
The UK Tropical Peatlands Working Group met in at the University of Leicester to discuss research progress, the group website, funding opportunities and we also started a conversation in this group on the topic of responsible use of peatlands. We agreed to submit a session proposal to EGU for next year and heard about the PeatDataHub initiative.
Katy Roucoux, Tom Kelly and Freddie Draper presented their research on peatlands in the Pastaza-Marañón Foreland Basin of Peru at the European Conference of Tropical Ecology. A fuller report can be found here.
Our work has been used to provide the science basis – the carbon stock estimates (Draper et al. 2014) – for a major new $6 million conservation project in Peru. This is the first conservation project to be funded by the Green Climate Fund (GCF), the major international funding mechanism that has been created to … Read more
The floristic composition of the seasonally flooded and peat swamp forests of the Peruvian Amazon is poorly known in comparison to many other vegetation types in the region. But this lack of knowledge is not really due to a lack of fieldwork – there have been many environmental impact assessments related to the oil industry … Read more
PAGES C-PEAT is a new working group on the long-term history of peatlands around the globe. Drawing mainly on geological (including Holocene) perspectives, the group aims to synthesize our understanding of past change in peatland ecosystems and use that to help predict their future. Ian Lawson presented a summary of the group’s work on Pastaza-Marañón … Read more