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TRR 410:  WETSCAPES2.0: sinks, links and legacies of novel ecosystems in rewetted fen landscapes

Subject Area Biology
Agriculture, Forestry and Veterinary Medicine
Geosciences
Medicine
Term since 2025
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 531801029
 
Wetscapes, i.e. landscapes with a high share of water-saturated peatlands, were common in the Pleistocene lowlands around the globe. They provided vital ecosystem services such as carbon (C) sequestration, climate cooling, water purification, protection of surface water bodies from eutrophication, flood control and habitat provision for specialized flora and fauna. These ecosystem services are coupled to the landscape context, i.e. the entire wetscape and beyond. Temperate fens, i.e., minerotrophic peatlands with low acidity and high nutrient content, have been massively drained for agriculture. As a consequence, regions such as NE Germany, which host a significant proportion of Central European fens, face severe ecological consequences, such as greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, soil subsidence, eutrophication of downstream surface waters, increased vulnerability to flood events, habitat loss, and biodiversity decline. The vast majority of drained peatlands needs to be rewetted to comply with the Paris Agreement and EU and national policy targets and, indeed, this ‘Great Rewetting’ has begun. But evidence suggests that rewetting does not restore drained peatlands and wetscapes to their original state, but often leads to novel ecosystems with more available nutrients, less resistance to hydrological fluctuations, and different species compositions compared to (near-)natural peatlands. Up to now, rewetting has mainly been implemented for nature conservation, but future large-scale rewetting for climate protection must also involve areas that are currently used intensively for agriculture. Here, new, wet, productive land use - paludiculture - can be established, leading to further modifications in the abiotic and biotic functioning of these landscapes - wetscapes 2.0. Besides its holistic interdisciplinary approach on rewetted peatlands, WETSCAPES2.0 is innovative for its focus on connectivity of exchange processes within rewetted peatlands and beyond to the wetscapes 2.0. The CRC/Transregio WETSCAPES2.0 will provide a functional understanding of these new wetscapes, and address the spatio-temporal implications of peatland rewetting at landscape level and beyond. WETSCAPES2.0 integrates a consistent set of approaches, including (1) a chronosequence of rewetted Screening Sites in NE Germany, (2) Core Sites for detailed field observations in space and time, (3) Landscape-Level controlled experiments (L-LExp), (4) mesocosm experiments (MCEcp) for causal understanding of relevant ecological functioning, and (5) process-based modeling to improve understanding and allow upscaling of findings. With its dedicated synthesis framework, WETSCAPES2.0 will thus quantify the environmental, climatic, and land use consequences of rewetting peatlands - a prerequisite for developing sustainable management.
DFG Programme CRC/Transregios

Current projects

Applicant Institution Universität Greifswald
Co-Applicant Institution Universität Rostock
Participating University Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
 
 

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