Methane emissions from high latitude peatlands - bridging the abyss between environmental factors and ecosystem scale methane formation and emission

Methane is the second most important biogenic green-house gas after CO2. High latitude peatlands, i.e. wetlands accumulating organic material as peat, constitute an important source of atmospheric methane. It is also well
established that high latitudes are undergoing the most intense changing climate. Thus, understanding methane emission from high latitude peatlands and how these will respond to a changing climate is urgently needed. This
project aims at develop our abilities to understand and to model ecosystem scale methane fluxes beyond using temperature and water table as master drivers. The project core concepts are: 1) Plant distribution and phenology constitutes the main controls through the substrate supply to the anaerobic methanogenic microbial community; 2) The vertical density distributions of metanogenic and methanotrophic microorganisms determines the potentials for methane production and oxidation respectively; 3) The long term (multi-annual) water table controls the vertical distributions and the actual WT controls the active proportions of methanogens and methanotrophs respectively. We will achieve the project goals by combining cutting edge methods and approaches from several most different scientific fields: molecular microbiology; Replicated Eddy Covariance methane flux measurements and dynamical foot print modelling; remote sensing techniques to characterise mire surface biogeochemical properties; repeated digital photography to derive plant phenology.