Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

RELEVANCE & SCIENTIFIC VALUE Upland peatlands offer vital ecosystem services from carbon storage, biodiversity, water provision, flood protection, aesthetic/recreational value, to economic value from grouse shooting and grazing. Due to historic and current atmospheric pollution, inappropriate land management and wildfires, large areas of peatlands are degraded. Peatlands restoration is one of the main tools to adress government PSA targets for biodiversity, soil and water protection in uplands. Restoration is of crucial importance to protect UK soil carbon stores, as more than 50% of UK soil carbon is stored in peat and is rapidly lost. Restoration efforts have started to restore bare peat at a landscape scale in the UK; the Moors for the Future Partnership (MFF) is revegetating 5km2 of bare peat within the Peak District. Monitoring is of pivotal importance to judge the success of the restoration, but traditional approaches with field-based permanent plots surveys are insufficient in terms of time and resource commitment. Natural England (NE) wish to explore remote sensing (RS) as an alternative, so are funding the CASE element via MFF. Key issues are to what extent can RS provide information on habitat condition (% cover, species composition) for reseeded peat soils, and how feasible is this in operational terms. AIM The project addresses the key problem of upscaling from permanent plots to landscape. It will evaluate the ability of high spatial and spectral resolution RS to distinguish between moorland restoration treatments and monitor changes over time using the case study of the Moors for the Future restoration programme in the Peak District National Park. The special case of remote sensing of sparse vegetation growth on peat soils offers a stimulating and feasible PhD topic. RESEARCH QUESTIONS 1. How well can 'restoration classes' (age-treatment of reseeding, gully blocks, key species) be distinguished on archive airborne hyperspectral images, aerial photographs and high resolution satellite images? 2. How accurately can plot data can be upscaled to classify restoration classes using a SPECIM (AISA Eagle/Hawk) airborne hyperspectral image & simulated satellite images? 3. How accurately can plot data can be upscaled to estimate key vegetation condition variables (e.g. % cover and presence of key species)? What are the thresholds? This presents a new challenge as the reflectance of peat and live plants are similar, unlike less organic soils. 4. What are the optimal times in the phenological cycle for image acquisition and how feasible is it to use hyperspectral data to monitor over time? 5. What are the costs, benefits, feasibility and geographic transferability of alternative images for operational monitoring? What are the critical sensor requirements for operational monitoring from space? BENEFITS OF THE COLLABORATION NE/MFF will gain an evaluation of the feasibility of using high spatial & spectral resolution RS to monitor peatland restoration. For the student, policy-relevance will be maximised. NE/MFF will provide expertise in ecology, access to key databases and excellent knowledge transfer facilities. AB has a CASE student with whom the student can work. AB and JM have a research collaboration spanning 5 years. EQUIPMENT MFF will provide dGPS. A spectroradiometer will be loaned from NERC-FSF & Sheffield. Manchester has the image processing facilities required and a Spatial Data Research Officer. SUPERVISION AB (MFF) will provide specialist training in habitat survey and knowledge transfer, JM in remote sensing. JM was PI for 3 sets of airborne data for the Peak District and supervised a PhD on RS of peat (awarded 2007). She serves on the Steering Committee of NERC's Ariborne Research & Survey Facility. The student will work in a strong research environment of >160 PhD students (93% completion rate). S/he will take part in the School's well-established research skills training programme

Northern peatlands are important terrestrial carbon (C) stores; they are estimated to store one-sixth of the global soil carbon stock in the form of slowly accumulated non-decomposed plant material, peat. The production of decay-resistant plant litter, in combination with constrained microbial metabolic activity, has resulted in peatlands being long-term C sinks. However, disturbances such as wildfires can damage this natural carbon sink, and lead to long-term negative impacts on the range of habitats and water-resource qualities of peatlands. Recently, in a period of less than two weeks, the Saddleworth Moor wildfire has consumed 1000 ha of peatland that contained a substantial amount of carbon. This carbon, previously locked away in the peatland, has re-entered the atmosphere where it directly contributes to global warming. The effects of the fire ripple further into the future as the wildfire has eradicated the plant and, most likely, the microbial community, which together play a central role in building up the soil carbon stock in the peatland. Given these impacts, and to limit the detrimental effects of the fire beyond the direct loss of a significant carbon pool, it is important to rapidly re-initiate the carbon uptake functions of post-fire peatlands, and restore this ecosystem to a pre-fire state. A previous study on former agricultural soils (Wubs et al. 2016; Nature Plants 2:16107) has shown that the restoration of pre-agricultural plant communities can be accelerated using microbial inoculates from soils taken from natural target communities nearby. If these findings are universal, inoculation of post-fire peatlands with microbial communities from natural peatland habitats can be used to speed up the recovery of the plant community, and even steer trajectories of re-vegetation to plant communities that have previously been lost (e.g. peat moss dominated communities in the Peak district). Peat soil inoculation may thus accelerate the recovery of ecosystem processes that underpin the carbon sink function of peatlands. RECOUP-Moor will explore the impacts of fire, and the role of soil inoculates in recovery, aiming to answer the following questions: 1. How has wildfire impacted on peatland microbial life? Here, we will identify the immediate effect of the fire on the composition of the plant and microbial communities and how the fire with different intensities have affected microbial activity and ecosystem processes such as carbon dioxide assimilation, respiration, methanotrophy and methanogenesis, and the production of dissolved organic carbon. 2. Can we speed-up recovery of the peatland ecosystem using soil inoculates? Our project will run an innovative and unprecedented experiment where we inoculate the post-fire peatland subjected to disparate fire intensities with peat microbial inoculates from adjacent intact (i.e. unburned) peatlands to test whether such restoration actions can speed-up the recovery of the ecosystem, with emphasis on carbon-related processes. This research project, RECOUP-Moor, will bring a breakthrough solution to practitioners, as it will provide essential knowledge on the effectiveness of soil inoculates as a restoration technique that targets the rapid recovery of carbon sequestering vegetation after severe disturbance. Testing the application of this new 'restoration toolbox' will allow land managers, conservation bodies, and policy makers to direct restoration after disturbance, and also aid in general restoration of degraded peatlands. This will benefit habitat creation, and climate-change mitigation and water-resource management through improving the quality of peatland ecosystems.

Peatlands are the largest store of terrestrial carbon in the UK and carbon uptake and release from these systems is highly sensitive to changes in climate and human impacts on the peatland ecosystem. This application will aim to define a series of key research questions around the contribution of UK upland peatlands to climate resilience, particularly with respect to resilience of carbon stores to drought and flood in restored and eroded landscapes. We aim to co-produce these research questions through engagement with two key academic communities and with peatlands practitioners and to define them in an authoritative state of the science paper. The project will bring together a multidisciplinary group of peatlands scientists, microbiologists and peatland management practitioners. Other key outputs will be a Prioritised Research Plan and a Stakeholder Guidance document. While there has been work on the impact of upland restoration on peatland carbon dynamics, the process understanding of the links between climate change, flood, drought and peatland carbon storage is limited, and the potential connection with climate resilience is unclear. The processes governing carbon store resilience are predominantly microbial, requiring collaboration between microbiologists and the well-established communities of peatlands scientists and practitioners. Through considering the role of microbes in driving the resilience of the carbon store in peatlands the proposal addresses objective 1, knowledge gap 2 and objective 2 of the UK Climate Resilience programme. We are requesting £45 k to define the key research questions linking microbial diversity and function to the resilience of the peatland carbon store. We propose five activities: 1) convening a series of interdisciplinary workshops of leading UK and international microbiologists, peatland scientists and restoration practitioners to develop interdisciplinary research approaches to understanding peatland response to flood and drought; 2) formulating a Prioritised Research Plan and a Stakeholder Guidance document from these workshops; 3) work with peatland stakeholder groups to develop practical applications of the process understanding (e.g. use of microbial community data as indicators of restoration success); 4) engagement with groups modelling UK climate resilience to incorporate data on uplands and upland processes into wider UK climate resilience work; and 5) synthesis of the findings from these activities with a major review of the literature to define the state of the science and key research questions to develop a process based understanding of the potential role of peatlands in climate resilience.