Repeat – REthinking sustainable land use of PEATlands

This project aims to combine hard data on peatland carbon stocks and peatland restoration with an understanding of peatland management, to develop new knowledge about sustainable planning and management of peatlands, and to disseminate this knowledge among public authorities, the scientific community, and the general public.

Unsustainable land use, climate change, and biodiversity loss threaten all life on Earth, including mankind. Knowledge-based planning and management of peatland can play an important role in tackling these issues, since intact peatlands are recognised for their huge carbon stocks and as important biodiversity reservoirs.

Repeat aims to develop effective methods to assess the extent and depth of our Norwegian peatlands. Moreover, large peatlands that have previously been degraded through ditching are presently being restored, but we do not know how effective our restoration measures really are. Regarding peatland management, we see substantial incongruities. For instance, peatland degradation is banned for agricultural purposes, but allowed for development of roads, renewable energy, and cabins. For wind power development, the law requires peatlands to be restored after the concession period, but it is unclear what this really means in practice.

Updates

  • Hope resides in these ancient plants

    Who will take responsibility for restoring the damage caused by humans? Sphagnum moss, this ancient form of life is ready to help, if we allow them to do their work.

  • Peatlands are important!

    A student at Ravnanger secondary school in Askøy outside Bergen wrote the above after a five-week curriculum about peatlands. The curriculum was created as a collaboration between their teacher Målfrid Skarprud, and Lisa Steffensen and Inger Auestad from Repeat/HVL.

  • How deep are the peatlands at Ørskogsfjellet?

    In the summer of 2023, we measured peat depth at hundreds of locations around Ørskogsfjellet in Møre og Romsdal County. These can help us to develop better maps of peat depth in Norway.

  • Repeat represented at the European Peatland Conference ‘Power to the peatlands’ 2023

    More than 500 researchers and stakeholders in nature management, agriculture, politics and business gathered in Antwerp to exchange knowledge and experiences in the field of peatland research. The range of contributions spanned carbon storage, restoration, management, policy, and more. On the last day of the conference, participants could join various guided field trips to gain insight into the natural values and the opportunities and pitfalls of peatland management.

  • Research meeting in Repeat in Fjærland spring 2023

    Beautiful Fjærland was the venue for the first meeting bringing together researchers in Repeat, held May 30th – June 1st 2023. Over the course of two days, seventeen participants got to know each other and the content and progression of the five work packages. It was particularly nice that partners from the University of Oslo (UiO), the Norwegian Institute for Nature Management (NINA) and from British partner institutions – University of Edinburgh (UoE), The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) and Forest Research (FR) – also had made the trip, and filled out the core group from HVL and UiA.

  • Measuring peat carbon stocks at Okla wind farm

    The summer now well behind us marked the start of field data collection in Repeat's work package 1---about soil carbon stock estimation. One of the two sites that were in focus during this year's field work was Okla wind farm (Stad municipality) in Western Norway.

  • Sogndal

    Partners gather for first workshop in Sogndal 25-26. April

    In the Repeat project, we are working to find new models for sustainable management of peatlands in cooperation with the most important societal actors in this arena. Therefore, we are gathering partners from public administration and interest organizations for a joint survey of how we perceive peatlands, and what challenges we face when we plan and implement various measures in peatlands.