Locating and delineating peatlands and organic soils in the tropics

Authors:
Alexandra Barthelmes, Uwe Ballhorn and John Couwenberg

Book:
Proceedings of the 15th International Peat Congress

Venue:
Kuching

Keywords:
high-carbon-study, legacy-soil-maps, peatland-mapping, proxy, remote-sensing, tropics

Documentfile:
ipc16p185-190a140barthelmesballhorn.etal_.pdf

Summary:

SUMMARY

Deforestation and drainage of organic soils stop their ability to sequester carbon and lead to the emission of huge amounts of greenhouse gases both through microbial oxidation and fire. The development of oil palm plantations is one of the main trigger for clearance and drainage of organic soils in the tropics. Drained peatlands are – even when emissions from peat fires are excluded – responsible for 5% of the global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions,which is almost double the amount of CO2 emissions from aviation (Wetlands International 2015). Rewetting drained peatlands has therefore a large GHG mitigation potential. According to the High Carbon Study (Raison etal. 2015; Barthelmes et al. 2015), all tropical organic soils with more than 20% soil organic matter or more than 12% soil organic carbon and 15 cm depth of the organic layer should be excluded from development. This study…