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Overview of peatland restoration in Western Europe

Dr Roxanne Andersen, Research Fellow at the Environmental Research Institute, has led a team of peatland restorationists across Europe, including Penny Anderson, to write a paper based on presentations to the Society for Ecological Restoration meeting in Manchester last year. The paper, ‘Overview of peatland restoration in Western Europe’, has been accepted by Restoration Ecology, the journal of the Society for Ecological Restoration.

The work reviews 25 years of restoration, including an overview of techniques used in different contexts, and evaluates the status of the evidence base for restoration outcomes. We found that between 1993 and 2015, EU-LIFE nature programme alone invested 167.6M€ in 80 projects, aiming to restore 913km2 of peatland habitats, mostly in the NATURA 2000- EU network. This represents less than 2% of the remaining peatlands in these countries, most of which have been impacted to some degree by anthropogenic disturbances.