WP4 Peatland restoration
Main objective: To improve methods for evaluating restoration success, and for identifying optimal restoration locations under different climate change scenarios.
Tasks
The WP involves academic partners, SVV, Sabima, and the County Governors of Vestland and Oslo/Viken. We will model the geographic distribution of endangered, raised bogs in SE Norway, based on an existing data set of occurrences. We will integrate recent methodological developments in ecosystem and species distribution modelling to capture the relationship between raised bogs and biologically proximate climate variables and other predictors. Predictions of the future distribution of raised bogs under various climate change scenarios will support selection of optimal sites for future restoration.
Moreover, we will compare methods for estimating restoration success (or time to recovery after restoration, a proven benchmark) by using the best data available from long-term peatland restoration studies. To expand the timeframes, we will add extra vegetation censuses to existing time series data sets from Norway, started in 1998 and 2014, and from Scotland, started in 1996 and 1998.
We will compare how well various metrics estimate restoration success: multivariate metrics (based on species composition) versus simpler univariate metrics (species richness, total cover of plant groups, and environmental variables). We will analyse multivariate data by the novel ordination regression-based approach ORBA and univariate data by linear mixed-effects models.
Research questions
- What are the potential distributions of raised bogs in Norway under different future climate projections?
- What is the expected time to recovery of restored peatland, and are univariate approaches to estimation as good as more complex approaches?
