Peatlands form under specific hydrological settings and are sensitive to changes in hydrological conditions and climate. Peat hydrological properties and peatland greenhouse gas balance can change drastically after disturbances such as drainage, permafrost thaw, or mechanical compaction. Hydrological conditions are also a key control for ecosystem services offered or regulated by peatlands including biodiversity, carbon storage, and nutrient retention. In addition, the role of pristine and disturbed peatlands in flood retention, support of low flows and regional climate remains debated. As hydrological and biotic processes in peatlands are strongly coupled, predicting the eco-hydrological effects of climate change, degradation, and restoration on peatland ecosystem responses—including greenhouse gas emissions—is a demanding task for the peatland community.
This session addresses peatland hydrology and its interaction with ecosystem processes across all latitudes. We invite contributions that advance our understanding of groundwater and surface water processes in peatlands and their role in ecosystem functioning, across scales from pore structure to catchments to continental scale. We particularly welcome studies that look beyond the topmost active layer and consider the entire peat profile as well as aquifer–peatland interactions, and encourage papers from understudied regions where field studies are scarce and inclusion into Earth system models is largely pending. We invite submissions on: (1) hydrological processes operating in all types of peatlands (pristine, disturbed, degraded, drained, managed, rehabilitated or re-wetted) in boreal, temperate, and tropical latitudes; and (2) the first-order control of peatland hydrology on all kinds of peatland functions.
We aim to advance the transfer of knowledge and methods, and welcome laboratory, field, remote sensing, and modeling studies on hydrological, hydrochemical, biogeochemical, ecohydrological or geophysical topics, as well as ecosystem service assessments within peat-dominated landscapes.