ForPeat: Towards sustainable peatland forest management

ForPeat

Peatlands are a critical ecosystem. They store large amounts of carbon, offer a wide range of ecosystem services, and are a unique habitat for many highly adapted, rare and threatened species. However, around half of Europe’s pristine peatlands have been lost or converted. For peatland forests this led to a wide array of ecological conditions, characterized by significant variability in nutrient status, peat depth, hydrology, drainage practices, and management, complicating forestry practices and restoration efforts. To promote effective and sustainable management of peatland forests, it is essential to better understand the impacts of different management practices on GHG emissions, nutrient cycles, and biodiversity. Building this deeper understanding is the aim of the ForPeat project. The project will improve the environmental, climatic, and economic performance of peatland forests, all while minimising the negative impacts of management practices on ecosystem health and global climate.

Real world testbeds and advanced monitoring techniques

The ForPeat project will collect critical data, including eddy covariance measurements, across eight Open Labs in Europe. The Open Labs are located in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Poland, Netherlands, Austria, Italy, and Portugal, and their data will address an existing data gap on greenhouse gas fluxes of European peatland forests. The Open Labs will serve as real-world testbeds for sustainable peatland forest management. They will demonstrate innovative practices such as semi-rewetting, continuous cover forestry, and biodiversity enhancement, while monitoring impacts on carbon sequestration, water quality, and ecosystem health. RSS will contribute to the project by developing advanced remote sensing techniques to create multiscale maps of peatland forest types and their management practices, giving a clear picture how these lands are used. We will also develop remote sensing and AI models for tracking environmental parameters such as greenhouse gas fluxes or wetness. This will help to determine ecosystem responses to management practices and allow for scalable monitoring of these ecosystem responses. RSS will further provide a cloud-based monitoring platform which will not only serve as a central hub to disseminate monitoring results, but also enable transparent digital monitoring, reporting, and verification of management and restoration impacts on peatland forests. Remote sensing will also be used to model biodiversity parameters and ecosystem services. The tested management and restoration practices in the Open Labs, combined with the advanced monitoring solutions, will generate novel understanding about peatland forest management and its impacts on biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and ecosystem services.

Long-lasting impact and transferable knowledge

The Open Labs’ heterogeneity ensures that the project’s restoration methodologies and monitoring solutions are replicable across Europe. ForPeat will not only consider technical and environmental aspects, but also social and economic ones, like timber harvesting and eco-tourism. The project will provide sustainable restoration technologies along with practical management recommendations to landowners and science-based recommendations to policymakers to improve peatland forest management. The recommendations and designated decision support tools will allow land owners to balance the trade-offs between economic aspects and biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services, and climate benefits.

ForPeat will pave the way towards improved and sustainable peatland forest management in Europe and will implement robust and transparent monitoring techniques for peatland forest management and restoration.

Project Partners

The ForPeat project, funded through the Horizon Europe programme, will start in October 2025, run for 48 months, and bring together 22 partners from 15 countries across Europe.