hello everybody
my name is michael rayner i am the dean of research
at the university of the highlands islands and in that capacity i also
look after the university's graduate school and it's my
really great pleasure on behalf of the university to
welcome everybody here today to this very very special occasion
the inaugural professorial lecture of professor roxane
andersen i do have just a couple of quick notices
to pass on to you before i hand over to our principal and vice chancellor who
will
introduce roxane formally to you could
i ask you all please to note that this event is being recorded
and the recording will be available later i'll tell you something more about
that towards the end of the event today also could i ask you please to post
any questions that you might have that you might
like roxane to try to answer and she will not so
i'm sure very well in the q a section of the screen that you should have
available to you and i will pick up those questions and pose them on
your
behalf to roxane thank you very much for attending
this inaugural lecture it's a bit
strange for me to be giving the inaugural lecture to my screen in my
home office but i hope that you will enjoy it and i
hope that i will enjoy it as well so
before starting the lecture i just wanted to dedicate
today's presentation to my dad my dad unfortunately passed away with
cancer this year just a little bit before
my title was confirmed and i know that he would have been extremely proud
because he had alw
ays been my biggest supporter so just an
acknowledgement of the immense support that i've received from my dad and the
rest of my family throughout what has been so far
a very difficult year and you don't become a professor i think
without an immense network of support and
an immense network of collaborators and before starting my presentation i just
wanted to acknowledge that all the research that i have been doing
so far and the research some of this that i would be presenting
today has been d
one in collaboration with so many people
and i just want to acknowledge that because this is not just
my work this is the collective work of the amazing peatland
scientific family that i'm very grateful to belong to
and of course research needs funding and i also just wanted to acknowledge that
i've been extremely lucky over the years to have my research
funded through by a number of different agencies and
funders and i just want to acknowledge that
research would not be possible without that th
at support
and today today what i really wanted to cover with you is a little bit of my
journey my journey through the discovery of
peotland and then the main thing i wanted to to talk about
what really just to talk a little bit about peatlands what they are
what defines their resilience and how they respond to disturbance and
restoration in particular and how our research is is now
starting to understand how we can measure
the response of peat to disturbance and restoration across
scale and tim
e so just to start with maybe just give you a little bit of
background knowledge about northern peatlands which are
my habitat of choice my habitat of preference
northern peatlands cover about three percent of the planet and they're found
in the areas of the planet where climate and the landscape setting
allows for a plant to start to accumulate and decompose
not completely and form peat so they take lots of different forms so
there's peatlands that are dominated by
vascular plants and can cover
huge areas so for
example i've been very lucky to go to
many areas where there was fens or graminoids sedge dominated
peatlands particularly in alberta there's also a number of other types of
peatlands including bog which are typically dominated by
sphagnum mosses and can exist either as open landscapes or treed landscapes
so here's some example of peatlands that i've also had the
chance to visit on in siberia on the left
in canada on the right often peatlands occur in mosaic
of these different
types of peatlands interconnected together
forming covering large large expanse of landscapes and in some particular parts of the
planet at high latitudes where we find oceanic hyperoceanic
climates where the climate is cool year-round with excess precipitation or
very high moisture there's one particular type of peatland
that can form it basically forms over the landscape blanketing the
landscape and incidentally is called the blanket bog
so only three percent of all the peatlands
in the plane
t are blanket bogs this is a globally really rare type of peatland
but it also happens to be the type of peatland that is the most prevalent in
the uk and in particular in scotland where it covers
nearly a quarter of the land area and blanket bog like some of the other
peatlands are typically dominated by a mixture of different types of plant
including sphagnum sedges and shrubs and here is an example
of a blanket bog up here in the north of scotland
all of these peatlands share one thing in com
mon and it's that
the plants that cover the peatlands do
whatever plants do they take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through
photosynthesis and incorporate it into their biomass
however in peatland the conditions don't allow the decomposition
process to take place at very very fast and because of that there is
an imbalance the uptake by plant exceeds the losses that can
come through uh degradation from aerobic respirations was formed as co2 anaerobic
decomposition in the form of methane o
r either
or aquatic losses so carbon that leaves the system
into into the waterways as a result the peatlands accumulate organic matter
and carbon over time this process in
peatlands happen very slowly the the northern peatland
average is about one millimetre per year so it effectively accumulates very
very slowly and forms deposits over a very long
period of time in northern scotland where the climate
is particularly cool and this rate is even a little bit
slower and then this is something that
some of
our research has been uh finding uh in the last few years
so peatland store carbon and they store it for a very very long time
but very slowly but what that means is is that as long as you don't disturb
these conditions that exists in peatland as long as the
the peatland can continue to take up the carbon it just stays in the system
and i really like this graphic that is has been
produced by a group in canada and it just shows that
most of the carbon in peatland most of the biomasses is
in the peat underneath the soil and and there may be more carbon in
peatland than there is in a tropical rainforest which seems
quite counterintuitive when you look at the rainforest and you see all the trees
on the top however and that's really the important thing as well is that
the carbon is not just there's not just more carbon it stays in the system for
far longer whereas typically carbon in forest system would stay for
hundreds of years if the peatlands remain undisturbed
the carbon there
can stay for thousands and thousands of years
in scotland the peatlands have started to form after the retreat of the
last glacier and and has been continuing
to grow ever since so thousands and
thousands of years and if left alone and if the landscape
processes allow it this then can eventually become coal
which means that the carbon is stored for
even longer periods of time so what that means is that despite the
fact that peatland only covers three percent of the land area
they store nearly a
third of the soil carbon
there is more carbon in the peatland than there is in the rest of the earth's
biomass combined more than twice the forest of the earth
and therefore that makes peatland absolutely extraordinary in their
capacity to store carbon they're the most
efficient terrestrial carbon sink that we have
on the planet and my favorite plant is
is sphagnum and sphagnum is the species that
makes bog the species that is so important for it for some of these
northern peatlands and and thi
s species is very small it's
a very very small moss but we know now that there is more
biomass bound up in in sphagnum moss living or dead so either living or in
the form of peat or in the form of coal than there is in any other single
genus of plant on earth i mean how cool is that there is no
cooler plant than sphagnum on the whole planet
in my opinion sphagnum are amazing they're what we call
ecosystem engineers basically their biochemistry
their ecology their morphology means that not only d
o they thrive in
conditions that we find in northern latitude they actually create
those conditions and they sustain these conditions
over time by creating acidic condition maintaining high water table keeping the
system with low input from groundwater so very
low in nutrients and in doing that over thousands of
years and since they started to evolve 20
million years ago what it means is that sphagnum have
actually had a really big effect on the global
biogeochemistry they have helped cool the c
limate over those long periods of
time and have helped maintain these cool conditions
in which they thrive these conditions in turn
are very specific and require unique adaptation from all the other
organisms that can live in peatland things like carnivorous plants for
example again can be found there but also a
whole range of uniquely adapted very specialist species across a
whole range of taxa from invertebrates to microbes to vertebrates
to plants and that means that
although there is not a l
ot of species in peatland the species that are
found there are absolutely unique and really really important in terms of
contribution to global biodiversity
and and as i said through these through their capacity to engineer their own
environment and through these very complex feedback
loops that involve their structure their ecology and their
physiologies helped maintain this high water table
and that's really the key into inhibiting the decomposition that allows
the peat to accumulate so they m
aintain this
anaerobic condition the conditions in which microbes
are not really able to to decompose the organic matter so peat continues to
build up and as it does so the cycle continues and what is also quite amazing is that
not only is the the sphagnum influencing the hydrology of the field and it also
influenced the mechanics the properties of the feeds the
properties of the porosity the elasticity and the mechanical properties
of the peat mean that it actually has as a landscape
in respons
e to change in volumes of water and gas by expanding
when there's a lot of water or gas or shrinking when there's a dewatering
or degassing event this phenomenon is known as bog
breathing peatlands breathe how amazing is that
peatlands breathe and that is a really important key
feedback mechanism that has enabled and maintained resilience of peatlands
for a very long time we've known that for quite a long time we've known that
for many decades however whilst it's been possible to measure
ecology
and it's been possible to measure hydrology
in peatlands it's been very difficult to measure
that mechanical response the bog breathing response on the ground
imagine trying to risk to measure the response of a surface by walking on that
surface it's very very difficult indeed and
one of the most interesting pieces of research i've been involved with in the
in the last few years has been trying to find a solution how can we measure bog
breathing which we know is going to be a really
important m
easure of resilience without going on to the bog and of
course one of the the possible solutions is to turn
to space and use satellite and that's exactly
what happened when in 2016 a group of researchers
led by david large at the university of nottingham
myself and andrew sowter from terra motion decided to try and see
whether satellite radar could provide a solution
with the sentinel satellites that go around the earth every six days
one of the satellite uses radar and the radar basically bounc
es off the surface
and goes back to the satellite and every time it does that it provides
a distance a measure of surface elevation and by comparing multiple
measures over time you can build up a time series of how
the surfaces is moving and these time series of motions
are effectively a measure of the bog breathing
and what we've been doing over the last few years has been
trying to understand this is that measure valid is that representative
of what we understand of peatland in ecology and hyd
rology so we've looked at
those time series we've looked at the longer
long term trend we deconstructed those time series to look at seasonal
oscillation patterns and different properties and validated
it against field observation to start to develop some of the applications
and what we found really was that those satellite-derived surface motion
are indeed true reflection of what happens on the field in terms of its
hydrology and ecology at a range of scales and therefore it becomes an ideal
to
ol just to do the resilience over large
areas for example here on the graphic you can see that the
the line in blue is showing a long-term trend of uplift which is representative
of a mass gain otherwise or if you want the
peatland is growing the orange curve is showing a negative trend
of subsidence it means the mass lost is shrinking and that's
usually associated with degradation of the
erosion for example or shrinking through drainage
in other words this is an ideal tool to explore peatland r
esilience and for the
very first time what we've been able to do is apply that
large scale monitoring of the surface motion to understand how peatland
landscapes respond to disturbances in 2018 there was a severe drought
across the whole of europe and during that drought we were
monitoring some of the we were looking at some of the data and
what we found was that during a drought period as we expect the
pores in in sphagnum collapse as the peat dries the pores collapse
and that leads to a rapid
subsidence of the
surface that you can see here on the graph as the black
arrows pointing through that period of drought the surface goes down very
quickly as it goes down the peat compresses a
little bit and that maintains a very high
moisture level basically after the drought the peat was wetter
than it was at the start of the drought because of that mechanical
collapse and and when we can so that's a really important kind of
mechanism for resilience and what we found was that that mechanism
w
as in particular very important for next and the next disturbance that
happened to to our peatlands when in 2019
following that year of drought we had a very big wildfire
up here and we used the insar data to look at
how the response during the drought had influenced the resilience to
fire so the severity of burning and what we find is that all of those
areas that had high cover of spaghnum have had this
really kind of good condition peat collapsed really rapidly so these areas
are indicated by
the darker colours on the image on
the left and these entire corresponded to areas that were not
so impacted by the wildfire where we only found unburned or low severity
burning the response of degraded areas was
different where there was no collapse and instead a higher severity of burn
if we summarize that what we found was that the negative feedback loops that
link the mechanics the hydrology and the ecology are really important to
increase resilience in your natural peatland
and through degr
adation if we switch these negative to positive feedback
loops it means that losing that mechanical response
can make them more vulnerable to additional disturbances
and that really takes me to the next part of
the talk where i want to tell you what the problem is with draining peat
bogs these bogs have long been under
appreciated and converted to different land uses
to increase productivity food production timber production and
other changes in land use the problem with that is obviously that
d
rainage so changing the hydrology impacts the mechanical properties
impacts the ecology and impacts all of those feedback that
makes the peatland not function anymore as a people
in fact so far globally the peatlands that
we think of as amazing carbon stores have actually
become net carbon sources of the atmosphere and that's because
even if only a small proportion of the peatlands have been degraded globally
this has completely switched the system around
and the carbon that is lost from the gre
ater peatland is just far quicker
than the carbon that is taken in by healthy peatland
as well as the carbon impacts there have been losses of biodiversity so the
losses of all of these unique species associated with peatlands
so drainage of peatlands and even small areas of peatland globally have had
profound impacts on on the the earth system in terms of of
the release of carbon and loss of biodiversity
of course this is very common to peatland here in scotland where we know that
about 80 perc
ent of our peatlands have been degraded to some degree
and in the uk it is now estimated that peatlands degraded peatlands
contribute emissions of approximately 23 23 million tons of carbon dioxide
equivalent per year if you don't know what that means it
means that if we decide to include our peatlands in the ipcc reporting
it actually switches the whole landuse sector from a net sink to a net
source of carbon and if we think about our targets of
reaching net zero well having drained peatland is
really
not going to be a a good thing for us we need to tackle
that problem if we want to meet these targets
but it's not just about meeting our targets these emissions
and because of the breakdown of these feedback mechanisms are
are likely to increase even further with additional pressure from climate change
and in particular become very sensitive to
catastrophic losses that could happen through drought and in particular
wildfire and if we want to put that in perspective
recently we prepared
for a presentation where we we tried to put
that into the global picture so you can see
in the graph here the the kind of purple color represent
the potential peatland carbon stock that could be at risk so that's
what exists in the peatlands today that we don't really know what the fate of
this system is going to be because it depends what we're going to do to our
peatlands but orange represent the current
emissions from degraded peatlands so not that much but not negligible either
and the remai
ning the blue colour represent our
remaining budget to one to 1.5 degrees and what is apparent and
really critical here is that we only need to
lose a tiny bit of what is left in our peatland to blow
up our chances of maintaining the global temperature below 1.5 degrees these
habitats are absolutely critical in the the
survival of our species and of course some people have
understood that and over the last 25 years the
understanding of the importance of peatland for biodiversity and greenhouse
g
as emission has led to the large scale restoration
initially started small scale but is now happening at a faster pace than ever
and on unprecedented scales and you can see it
here with the digger in the picture and the area covering thousands of
hectares of restoration however it is important to make sure
that if we deploy these resources if we invest money and
if we invest time and if we invest equipment into restoration we need to do
that in the most cost efficient way because there are limit
ed resources and
therefore we need a really sound understanding of peatland
that needs to be underpinned by really robust evidence base
and this was really what i was asked to do when i started to work for the
for the UHI in the north of scotland i was asked to develop peatland research
in Scotland and in particular to build the evidence base
for forest to bog restoration in the Flow country of northern scotland
the Flow country is the largest expanse of blanket bog in the world that
globally ra
re type of peatland and it covers
pretty much the whole of the north of scotland and you can see why being at
ERI gives me a home advantage in terms of studying
Flow country peatland it is also up for unesco world
heritage site because of its its quality in terms of habitat
and biodiversity however much like the rest
of scottish peatland and uk peatland it's
not been spared by human influence and about 17% of the flow
country peatlands have been afforested with non-native conifers during the
196
0s to the 1980s and that was largely a consequence of a
poorly designed tax incentive it was well-meaning it was to stimulate
the economy and make the the uk independent in terms of
its timber production after the second world war but it has
absolutely devastating impacts on breeding waders
and conservation of these of these important habitats because of
that impact on biodiversity and the recognition of that impact since the
late 1990s there has been efforts to turn back
these landscape into op
en blanket bogs rather than a forested
704
00:25:56,240 --> 00:26:00,480
landscape but there was a number of different
questions that we needed to answer to help understand
the impact of forestry but also how to to go about with the restoration
one of these questions was well do we know what
was putting trees on peatland and really a bad idea in terms of carbon
or are the trees actually compensating for whatever carbon might
be lost from the peatland if we do this forest to bog restoration
do
es it work can we bring back the biodiversity below
ground processes and everything that leads back to carbon sequestration
and if we do it and if we do that can we actually get carbon benefit and climate
benefit from doing that forest to bog restoration
and that was really my mandate when i started so i thought i can't answer all
of these questions by myself let's set up a collaborative coordinated
network of researchers and stakeholders because that's what i learned
in my formative years in ca
nada and then get some funding together and start
getting data and over the the last kind of nine years
that's allowed us to set up well over 40
collaborative projects under the umbrella of the flow country
research hub and these projects have tackled everything from bog breathing
biodiversity greenhouse gas emission water quality carbon stock hydrology
brought them all together to help us understand what has happened
so did afforestation cause carbon losses well of course we know
some of the pr
ocesses that lead to carbon losses we know that it depends if
trees take up carbon and it depends how much carbon
goes out and how much carbon goes in however there was nobody at the time
when the trees were planted to measure those fluxes of carbon
and nobody to do it for the whole time of the plantation so it's very difficult
to know how much carbon is being lost for the whole time using that kind of
approach we need a different kind of approach we need to compare
stocks of carbon it's difficu
lt to do carbon stocks comparison if you don't
have something a date a similar date to compare with so
you need to compare things that are similar that have accumulated
over the same period of time and to do that we decided that we'd use
something that is quite particular of peatlands and it's their capacity to
store things over time and that thing in particular
was the the ash clouds that come out of volcanic eruption in iceland so when
a volcano erupts in iceland and there's an ash cloud some
of that ash
will deposit over peat and as peat continues to form it will
slowly but surely accumulate layers of ash very thin layers of ash in
the peat if we can identify these layers of ash
and the tephra which are the microscopic volcanic
shards that are preserved in the peat they become extremely useful
chronological markers because unlike carbon dating that can be a
little bit uncertain or that has got some uncertainty
when you have the the shards you know for sure what eruption it came from
and
then you have a very precise dating that you can use for comparison
therefore what we did is develop novel methods
to detect and and identify those those charts in peat so we we used
an ITRAX or x-rays to to basically x-ray lots and lots of peat cores to
find those layers and identify layers that were common
throughout a lot of different areas in the region we found that one
particular layer Hekla 4 was present in a lot of the different
peatlands in the flow country and we could use that
wh
at we then did is collected peat cores in forestry area and
of areas that were adjacent to them but due to political boundaries it's not
been afforested and compared the stocks of carbons above
Hekla 4 between those two areas we also then
collected the harvested the trees and the root mass to see how much
carbon had been stored in the trees in in the meantime and did for afforestation cause carbon
losses probably and probably a lot so that's what we
found we found that on average there there hav
e been losses
of a hundred and three tons of carbons per hectare in the peat itself
some of that had been compensated by the tree growth but not all of it
and in in most of the cases um there was some losses as well however
there was also a very big range of variation and it showed that it really
depended on the forestry practice the location of
the of the forestry in the landscape and the peatland in
itself and there's still a bit more that we need to understand however
it seems like the answer
is yes afforestation caused carbon losses and
probably potentially quite a lot of carbon losses
the second thing we wanted to know was how does forest and forest to bog impact
biodiversity and biogeochemical processes
like i said before bogs have very specialized communities of plants
and invertebrates and microbes and
higher vertebrates of animals and all of these lead to efficient carbon nutrients
and cycling through all of the feedback mechanism i was talking about earlier
so what we did is
we compared what we found in the bog with what we found in
the forest and what we found was effectively that
because the trees grow the canopy closes and it
introduced shades changed the nitrogen there might have been some fertilization
as well at the time of the forestry and all of these things mean that
the bog specialists disappear very rapidly and are
replaced by generalist communities or forest specialists
and these in turn don't have the same capacity to to maintain the the
efficient carbo
n and nutrient cycle and lead to
increased carbon losses and increased nutrient losses
but can we bring those back with restoration well
not really at least not with very simple restoration that were used at the time
when we started to do these the these pieces of research at
the time the restoration was mostly felling to waste which means the trees
were just cut down and left on site so there was a lot of brash
material of branches lots of timber that was left on
site and what we found was that
when all of that brash was still
present it really prevented the species to come back
and in particular some or most of the sphagnum moss
species were not able to come back and when we looked at the
invertebrate communities we found very similar things so this is a graph that
presents three of the species that are bog
specialists and what we can see is that these species are not very
common not very frequently found in forest
you can see in the graph or throughout the restoration chronosequence
that we
looked at so from year two to eighteen these species don't really change they
don't really come back and that's very different in the
bog where these species are all much more frequent
this is because these particular species of of carabid beetle are not very good
at going far out of the bog so they
don't disperse very easily and the distance that they would need to
cover to go from the bog to the restored area is a bit too big and
if they did manage to get there then they would be outc
ompeted by
some of the general species that are are there and then when we looked at
microbes we found more or less the same story
so some of the the microbes here that we looked at are
are called tested testate amoeba testate amoeba are effectively the tigers of
the microbial community they are the top of the microbial food
chain they eat bacteria and fungi and if they're in good order
then you have a good idea that the microbial loop is functioning
quite well and what we found again is that th
ose specialist species that are
typically associated with sphagnum are not coming
are not coming back what was really interesting was that
in particular a lot of the species that are associated with sphagnum
are what we call mixotropes they can do photosynthesis like a plant
as well as eat fungi and bacteria like the other testate amoeba
they're particularly sensitive to shade and to
water level and because these are not returning readily
with the the initial forest above restoration fell into w
aste that was
happening these are not coming back and
that really it really means that it's not just a
species that are not coming back it's also the function that they carry in
this case the contribution of photosynthesis
so we know that when we did the when the forested bog felling to waste restoration
was taking place it rapidly brings the water table a lot but it doesn't bring it
up all the time and what we see in this
graph is there's these little outliers so you can see at the in
the fores
try the water table is quite far below the surface somewhere
between 40 and 50 centimeters below the
surface but it dips much lower than that in periods of drought
after the restoration it rapidly rises but it continues to dip
into these much lower water table depths even
18 17 years after the the restoration has been done
and that's the key the sphagnum really needs that
stable high water table and these occasional dips mean that it changes
it changes some of the processes and again having left
brash on the
site meant that there was more nutrient kicking about and these
nutrients were entering the system and what we could see is that
when the branch started to be broken down by some of the organic
microbes then there was a pulse of nitrogen into the system
and that pulse of nitrogen in turn stimulates more decomposition
particularly in those periods where the water table drops down a bit lower and
increases oxygen so we have a bit more nutrient a bit more oxygen
that means a bit more
decomposition and and in turn
that makes a more rapid turnover
of the vegetation so gets turned over a bit more quickly
and that means that it impacts on the vegetation as well so that some
more nutrients are absorbed by the vegetation it's more easily decomposable
and so on and so on and so on but we still wanted to know even if the
spaces are not quite there yet even if those processes are not quite there yet
is forest to bog restoration returning that capacity
to sequester carbon and deliver
the climate benefits that we hope it can
and as we've just seen the woody debris and the water
do change do contribute to changes in water chemistry and do contribute to
emissions of carbon dioxide in particular in those periods of dry
dry weather and what we found when we compared the kind of net
ecosystem exchange that is the proportion of carbon going in
versus going out so positive numbers mean there's carbon
going out so what we found is that 10 years and 12 years after restoration
there is
still more carbon more carbon dioxide coming out
than going in so the peatlands are not yet functioning as a current sink
however when we looked at slightly older sites
so 16 18 years old these sites turned out to be net carbon
sink so even if some of the processes are not quite there yet
there is enough photosynthesis to stimulate that carbon uptak and to retain
the carbon in the system in terms of co2 and what was extraordinary in fact was
that the sites even Talaheel was better in terms of
c
arbon sequestration than the reference near natural bog
that's never been afforested that we use as a comparison for that so bringing that all together what we
what we understood was that when we had forest to bog restoration taking place in
these areas we could see two different types of
effect the first one was a restoration effect so the fact that we took the
trees down changed the system it was rapid change
in water chemistry increased of emission related to that
disturbance and a replacemen
t of some of the forest
specialists that need the trees by generalist species that are a bit
more able to cope with a range of condition
over time what we see is that the system is not
going back to a completely functional blanket bog and
that's because we have legacy effects so effects that take much longer to
overcome or thresholds that we've not been able
to get over yet that means there's still changes in
water chemistry there's carbon sequestration but still
not quite the right biogeochemic
al processes and that means that
in periods of drought for example these systems are more likely to
emit carbon and of course the persistence of these general species and
the lack of the recovery of those some of those key specialist species
and while the research was happening on the felling to waste
sites as is typical the practice was changing so the timber was getting
bigger the trees were getting bigger and and the information that we were
getting from our research also kind of supported th
e idea that we
should really get rid of the brash and we should try to re-wet these systems a
little bit better so we needed a bigger intervention and what happened
was that these some of these older sites
where forest to bog restoration had initially happened were revisited for
further enhanced management and new sites that were targeted by
restoration were just targeted by completely new and
different techniques and what we are now trying to understand
with the research is are these new method
s are maybe more
stronger in terms of intervention maybe more expensive do they actually bring
restoration effects faster so can we overcome these thresholds and these
barriers faster and can we actually get over the
hump and get those systems back into functioning
and what we find so far is that it seems that yes we can it seems that
there are faster changes the recoveries are a bit faster
and there may be a bit more space for some of those specialist species but
there might still be more that
we need to do and this is
really the the kind of next steps that we're trying to understand
but one of the challenges that we have is that it's fine to do these fine scale
studies and measure these fine scale thing
but restoration has been ramping up massively and we're now talking about
thousands and thousands of hectares being restored every year
so how do you do to measure condition and restoration outcome at
such large scales we can't just send everybody out to try
to measure you know invert
ebrate like our study or collect samples
everywhere or put out flux towers everywhere they are very expensive and
difficult to run we need to find another way to look at
peatland that could allow us to understand whether they are functioning
or not after restoration intervention and of course we we decided to try to go
back to bog breathing because we know now that bog breathing
can be measured from space we know that it's a reliable measure of
ecology and ecohydrological functioning and so in r
ecent years what we've been trying
to do is trying to understand could we use bog
breathing not just as a measure of resilience and understanding
impacts of of change but also as a way to measure
and monitor condition so one of the things that we did is that we
we used the flow country as a test bed for this
for this idea and we selected m 200 255 polygons
each polygons was you know a small area of peatland they were chosen in sites
that we knew very well and randomly across the whole of the flo
w country
and then we combined our understanding of these time series of of surface
motion with a very detailed ecohydrologycal
profiling by visiting some most of these sites and to you know
looking at the vegetation looking at the hydrology looking at the land management
history and we tried to come up with an
understanding of of the bog breathing signature
at the landscape scale that would be meaningful for monitoring
and what we found was that the different properties of the bog
breathing ing
were indeed really interesting to look at and and we
were able to relate them very effectively to different things
like management type and types of vegetation and eco-hydrological
functioning so what we found here looking at this multi-annual
velocity so the long-term trend is the peatland
growing or is the surface shrinking is that in most of the areas that were
under conservation management that were typically dominated with healthy
bogs with lots of sphagnum sedges these sites were showing
signs of uplift
then were actually the only sites where we could see uplift the subsidence the bigger subsidence
rates were found in the restoration of the forest to that was where the management
interventions are are much more intense and produce
that compaction with the machinery on top of the peatland the other properties of of surface
motion so not just not just the long-term
velocity but also the amplitude and the timing
put together against the hydrological attribute enables us to
produce
a classification that can then be used to monitor
condition or restoration progress over time and that
that is amazing it's like having a new lens to look at peatlands and a new way
to understand how peatlands can change over time
and by doing that we're able to match those with what we expect in terms of
restoration outcome but also what we expect in terms of
management so for example here we have a series of classes that are typically
recognizable features on the ground in terms of restoration
for example degraded peatland this is where you start
early re-wetting would be what we expect after the intervention
later wetting would be what we expect of the site would be on
on track to become a bit more like a function a bit more like a peatland
and then we have potential targets or endpoints
to the restoration whether they are pools or Sphagnum areas or for example
margins of the peatlands and then of course we can map that
progress against the target so here's an example where
we looke
d at the site that had been restored over a number of years
use the INSAR to produce a map of where we thought we were against
those targets based on the time series of INSAR surface motion
and that can be done for a site but it could also be done for
the whole of scotland for the whole of the peatland in scotland and we could
therefore over time be able to get a far better understanding of
where peatlands conditions are how are they changing
and how things are progressing and that really brings
me to the kind of
the conclusion and outlook of my lecture and and the things i hope you will
remember and the things that mean the most to me so to me peatlands
are a resilient system but also incredibly
amazing in their natural state and i think that the degradation of
peatlands already has had and could continue to
have catastrophic consequences for the earth
system and therefore we need peatland in restoration and conservation and
protection that needs to be underpinned by scientific eviden
ce
the support our fight against the global biodiversity and climate crisis and
i think that we are now at the point where we have new tools and technologies
that can support much more effective global
strategies for managing those those habitats and where do we go from
now well i hope to continue and i'm lucky to have funding to continue my
research looking into sphagnum and how it responds to change and
in particular to the dual pressures of climate change and land use change
and now that tran
slates to landscape resilience
and i'm also really hopeful that we can secure the world heritage site for the
the flow country peatlands because there is no peatland currently
recognized as a unesco world heritage site and to me that makes no sense at
all these are some of our most important
systems in terms of global carbon sequestration and that
surely is something that we want to leave for
the next generation of hopefully budding peatland
scientists and with that i just really want to
thank a
nd acknowledge again the huge support i've received over the years
from so many people and thank you again for for logging in
today and listening to my lecture so stop sharing now on
my screen thank you really very much indeed for
that roxane i've been utterly spellbound by what you've had to
present to us it's an amazing story i mean
one can feel across the airwaves the enthusiasm that
you bring to this and the passion that you bring to it and i think
what more could anybody ask for from an ina
ugural lecturer truly
truly wonderful really do appreciate that
i've noticed we have got one question that's come up in the chat and i'll pass
that on to you in just a sec if other
colleagues have got and visitors to to us have got questions
please put them in the q a session we'll get
through as many as we as we can but the first question
actually follows very nicely from what you've just said
and that was what advantages would designating the flow country
as a world heritage site actually brin
g i think i think there's a number of
things here really and in terms of advantages i think it's
really this stamp of approval this global recognition and
what i think is that having the flow country as a world heritage site
might just spur other countries that have very large peatland and to think
about their peatland in the same way the protection it
doesn't give automatically gives an extra layer
of protection but it is it does so through local planning and it
does so through the other layers
of protection that exists
but i think it also gives that much bigger
recognition and really my hope would be that if we can do that for the flow
country why not try to do that and maybe establish a network of global
peatland becoming world heritage site recognizing their importance for
for not just biodiversity but also climate
the global climate thanks very much indeed for that there's
there's a a few questions coming in now one actually is a
just request that we uh if it's possible at some st
age we don't know quite how to
do this but to share the list of academic references that you've
used in the presentation you've clearly sparked a considerable
interest in somebody there that we'll maybe
look at a way to do that but there is a question here
and this is moving on the screen as i'm
trying so is there a peak depth below which bog breathing doesn't
typically occur and so couldn't be used as a means of
drink bulk function this is really interesting what we find
is that there are actua
lly typical signatures of
bog breathing that that seem to be associated with thinner
peats so they're not going to be the same type of
signature but they may be the lack of certain
motion that be that we've could relate to the fact that they're a thin
peat but the the relationship between the bog
breathing and the peat depth is one that we're
really trying to understand a bit better and are actively working on at the
moment obviously deeper peat will have
different behaviors than very thin peat
and this is something that
we're hoping to to disentangle a little bit better again thanks very much indeed for that another another question here a note of
thanks for a brilliant and informative study with an exclamation mark
that will go for many people i think
question is have you thought on strategies
for restoration working the restoration of
working peat bogs where peat has been extracted really what's the best
strategic approach that can be taken if you've
covered that a little bit in wha
t you presented there's i mean this is
this is really where my career in peatland started so i did my
phd back in canada and i was working with extracted
sites and you know there have been lots and lots of
methods developed for the restoration of areas of peat that have been extracted
and a lot of it depends on how far down they've been extracted so ireland has
also been quite good in terms of the developing some of the restoration for
their kind of cut over and cutaway peats and
what is really
the key in that case is that
the bare peat substrates are not very hospitable for for vegetation so
plant reintroduction often is is needed and then the choice of the plant that
will go back depends on the condition of the peat the ph depends
on the nutrients and that will decide really
what plants you should be putting back and then it's all about water table
management so the hydrology bringing back that water table close to the
surface to allow these species to thrive but there is an incredib
le amount of
literature and knowledge in canada in particular in the states as
well and in ireland as well as a little bit in estonia
and the baltic countries where some of the restoration
have started to take place as well thanks for that another question do you have any
recommendations for how management of common grazings that can
serve peatlands but also provide economic
benefit to crofts how might that work in the
in the grand scheme of thing of protection and conservation of their
peatland
s yeah i suppose you know there's been quite a few peatland that
have undertaken restoration have not seen detrimental effects in terms of
grazing so i think the two are not completely
incompatible but there might also be other ways so there's a lot more
discussion now about you know potential carbon finance
or potential ways of of marketing the the good management of peatland so for
example maybe keeping your peatland in good condition could be a
way of generating income so there are these disc
ussion
happening at the at the moment where it might be possible
to you know get financial rewards for good management and good protection of
peatland that you know that may help support some
of these some of these communities but i don't think that they
are incompatible and i think that peatland restoration drain blocking is
perfectly compatible with you know with the continued use of
the of peatland or at least an area of grazing i think
it's just finding that right balance between the two tha
nks very much again let me come on to
a number of questions coming in now which is
really good to see one is how can we succeed in scaling from
micro to earth system gale pc cycling processes
it remains quite a a challenge now um i don't know how you'd respond to that
that sounds quite a technical question but i think that you know one of the
difficulty is really that we need to make sure that we have a
good understanding of the processes and then these processes need to be
integrated to some de
gree to to the the kind of modeling
that can happen at regional or global scales and
the cheeky answer to that question is if we get the funding for the the grant
that we just applied for we'll be able to tell you the answer to
that question in about five years that sounds very good that's one that
should be recorded and sent to the funders straight
straight away to perpetuate and encourage funding
we have time probably for a couple couple more that's all
but we will try to get answers to some o
f the questions that come in
after this event roxane has kindly agreed to do that for us so we'll
answer a couple more just now this one is do you
think climate change will ultimately impact peatland function in
other parts of the uk and if so over what likely time scales
might this for example affect the viability of restoration
work on shallower bank peats further south
and east in the uk i think there's two ways to answer that question
so one of the ways to answer that question is by saying t
hat
actually climate change is already impacting our peatland we've already seen
impacts of climate change in terms of the higher frequency of fire higher
frequency of drought so and i guess the way to think about it
is well if the peatlands are restored and
more resilient they're less likely to be impacted by future climate change
but another way to think about it is that
yes it may be true that in in the future and maybe 50
100 years time some of the areas that are currently covered in peatlan
ds may
be outside of their climatic space or may
not be in the in the best possible space for peatland to continue to function
it doesn't mean that those peatland will disappear overnight it doesn't mean that
they will stop to function but it might be that investing
restoration efforts might be you know might have to be
targeted to make sure that we restore the peatland that are more likely to be
still functional in in the long term in terms of
for their climatic space it is very difficult to pr
edict
where the climate space may be shrinking because the models are
you know inherently very difficult to we don't know where the
climate range really start because of this legacy of disturbance that we have
in the uk so we can't start with the current
distribution it's a bit it's a very difficult question but i really think
that there's this you know balance it's already happening
we know that restoration can help can bring some of the resilience back
and and because we need to target our eff
orts maybe it's good to target our
efforts uh where they are more likely to make a
bigger difference in the long term again thank you very much for that
probably one one more question if i may of all the things that you've
discovered uh in your research journey and the
career as you've um presented it today what would you say
has been the most exciting single thing that you've discovered and
what perhaps was the most surprising
that's a very good question i'm extremely excitable i get excited ab
out
with about just about everything i find about peatland but i must say that
the the research that we've been doing on bog breathing has has been truly
truly remarkable in terms of the the way that we've been able to rethink
peatlands in the last few years so for me
that that's really been one of the one of the highlights but i get excited
about just just about everything you know i was
reading paper recently about communication
between mosses through volatile organic
compounds and that's extr
emely exciting to me the idea that
mosses can be talking to each other and and i just i get just excited about
everything i think surprising i'd say
i'm not sure there's anything that is not equally surprising or exciting
but definitely i think there's so much fascination and that's probably why i
do this job is that i am curious i am passionate about peatlands in case you've
not noticed yet and and i do get truly excited about
every little thing that i find almost on a daily basis so i'm reall
y
sorry colleagues that are going to have to call a halt to
the questions as i say um there will be if there are others in
there that haven't been answered we will try to answer them
afterwards but there's there's a wee formal bit of this whole process that
i'm about to to do um just now with your your indulgence and i have to say is
with truly great pleasure that i've got the opportunity
on behalf of the university of the highlands and islands to
welcome you roxane formally into the university'
s professoriate
but before i do that there's a few things i'd like to say just to put all
of what we've been doing today into a little bit of context for
everybody that's here and first if i could if i could ask
everybody here just to try to bring to your mind if you can a
picture of what you think a professor is
i wonder what image that might conjure up in your
mind now i dare say for some of you it might be a charicature of somebody
perhaps wearing glasses being slightly awkward eccentric perh
aps a
university boffin you know a bit removed from reality
and everyday life the sort of charicatures that sometimes are presented
in the pictures you get in the the various
slip-outs that you can get now precisely whether that's an accurate
description or not what i think we can
all agree on is that when you use a title professor
it indicates somebody who's at the very top
of their academic game and a master of their chosen field and and that's what
we've heard and seen today
as such in being
honoured with the title professor
we've witnessed someone today in the person of roxane
who's been recognized for the highest rank that can be achieved in academia
who thoroughly deserves that accolade but what actually does a professor do
now you can answer that question in many ways because they do many things
they undertake advanced research and they publish
they lead the exploration of new areas they supervise postgraduate
students they lead motivate and inspire others
roxane andersen does a
ll of these things by the bucket load
and does them exceptionally well but she as other professors do much more than
that they act as ambassadors for their
university and for their field of study often taking on influential roles
in their institution and helping guide debate and even public
policy on the things that really matter to our
very lives they're also thought leaders in their
institutions and often lead initiatives and chair important committees and other
such things now in this univers
ity we are pleased to
be able to boast over 50 colleagues now who have attained professorial title and
they're in fields such as diabetes and cardiovascular science
history archaeology marine science gaelic language and culture and so on
we may only be a little over 10 years old
but we can already boast real excellence on the world academic stage for our
research and roxane andersen's addition to the
professoriate adds a further dimension to that
impressive and growing list so being awarded the
title professor
is a big deal and a very proud moment in the career of
any academic roxane is already a real superstar in my view and in a view of
many others and that's borne out by the really large number of people who
are here today in the in the audience a new record for an
event such as this roxane you are an inspiring leader communicator
researcher and teacher and it is with absolute pleasure that i'm now able to
welcome you professor roxane andersen professor of
peatland science to the pr
ofessoriate of the university
of the highlands and islands very many congratulations to you thank you very much michael now i know
that everybody else is around is applauding and you can't hear it but
i can assure you they i can assure you they are now that does bring us to the
end of what's been a truly exceptional event today but before everybody departs if i could uh ask you just to take note
of the thanks that we owe to our colleagues behind the scenes who have
got everything ready for today
's event
a really good event and could i also advise you as is coming up on the screen
now both of this lecture has been recorded
and will be available on the university's youtube channel in
the next week or so and that we have another professorial
inaugural lecture next week next tuesday on the 8th of
june at 4pm that'll be delivered by professor
john howe from the scottish association for marine science
sam's uhi and it's titled getting into deep water
adventures in marine geology please do fe
el free to sign up to that and to join
us if you can and to any of the other events that are
listed at the events page at www.uhi.ac.uk/events
thank you everyone very much indeed and a particular thanks to you
roxane it's been truly wonderful and we wish you many many more years of digging around
in the peatlands to come thank you very much (x2)
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