Impact of rewetting drained peatlands on soil microbial activity and composition and its climate mitigation potential

A climate mitigation and adaptation strategy applicable for Sweden is rewetting of drained peatlands, which can both aid in mitigating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and create a landscape with higher biodiversity being more resilient to drought/flooding and forest fires. The main aim with this project is to improve our understanding of the impact this climate adaptation and mitigation strategy has on the activity of soil microbial communities, and in turn their influence on the land atmosphere exchange of greenhouse gasses (GHG). A large-scale experiment at the Skogaryd Research Catchment provides a unique opportunity to study the impact of rewetting this peatland on the (1) the functional activity and diversity in the soil microbial community; and (2) to relate this to other environmental parameters such as GHG fluxes. Analyzing soil samples during this initial phase will be very important for catching the immediate impact of the rewetting on the soil microbial community, which can be connected with existing measurements on GHG emissions expected to give a pulse immediately after rewetting and then gradually change. Knowledge on soil function and microbial activity is of need for ecosystem modeling, feeding into policy decisions on rewetting for climate mitigation and adaptation.

This project is funded by the Strategic Research Area BECC.