Using remote sensing to assess peatland resilience by estimating oil surface moisture and drought recovery
Lees, KJ; Artz, RRE; Chandler, D; et al.Aspinall, T; Boulton, CA; Buxton, J; Cowie, NR; Lenton, TM
Date: 4 November 2020
Journal
Science of the Total Environment
Publisher
Elsevier
Publisher DOI
Abstract
Peatland areas provide a range of ecosystem services, including biodiversity, carbon
storage, clean water, and flood mitigation, but many areas of peatland in the UK have been
degraded through human land use including drainage. Here, we explore whether remote
sensing can be used to monitor peatland resilience to drought. We take ...
Peatland areas provide a range of ecosystem services, including biodiversity, carbon
storage, clean water, and flood mitigation, but many areas of peatland in the UK have been
degraded through human land use including drainage. Here, we explore whether remote
sensing can be used to monitor peatland resilience to drought. We take resilience to mean
the rate at which a system recovers from perturbation; here measured literally as a recovery
timescale of a soil surface moisture proxy from drought lowering. Our objectives were (1) to
assess the reliability of Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) backscatter as a proxy
for water table depth (WTD); (2) to develop a method using SAR to estimate below-ground
(hydrological) resilience of peatlands; (3) to apply the developed method to different sites
and consider the links between resilience and land management. Our inferences of WTD
from Sentinel-1 SAR data gave results with an average Pearson’s correlation of 0.77 when
compared to measured WTD values. The 2018 summer drought was used to assess
resilience across three different UK peatland areas (Dartmoor, the Peak District, and the
Flow Country) by considering the timescale of the soil moisture proxy recovery. Results
show clear areas of lower resilience within all three study sites, which often correspond to
areas of high drainage and may be particularly vulnerable to increasing drought
severity/events under climate change. This method is applicable to monitoring peatland
resilience elsewhere over larger scales, and could be used to target restoration work
towards the most vulnerable areas.
Geography - old structure
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