B31F-07
Consolidating and updating estimates of northern peatland extents and carbon stocks
Wednesday, 16 December 2015: 09:30
2008 (Moscone West)
Gustaf Hugelius1, Julie Loisel2, Glen M MacDonald2, Robert B Jackson3, Claire C Treat4, Merritt R Turetsky5 and Zicheng Yu6, (1)Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden, (2)University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States, (3)Stanford University, School of Earth, Energy, and Environmental Sciences, Stanford, CA, United States, (4)University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK, United States, (5)University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada, (6)Lehigh University, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Bethlehem, PA, United States
Abstract:
Conditions favoring peat accumulation have been particularly prevalent in boreal and subarctic regions. The large pool of organic carbon accumulated in Northern peatlands has been an important component in the global carbon cycle throughout the Holocene. All northern peatlands store an estimated 440 Pg organic carbon while a separate study estimates that permafrost region peatlands store ca. 300 Pg organic carbon. However, the degree of overlap between these studies remains unclear and there are differences in methodologies and definitions which prevent direct harmonization of estimates. Here we address this problems by (1) compiling several different databases of field observation data and by (2) comparing previously estimated northern peatland areal extents to the extents of organic soils estimated from compiled harmonized regional and national soil maps from the northern mid and high latitudes. Organic soils are by definition peatlands with >40 cm of near surface peat. The combined estimated extent of organic soils in these maps is 3.44 million km2. This is very similar to the spatial extents of Northern peatlands derived from various national peat resource inventories as reported by previous studies. Our results show that roughly one third of this organic soil area is in permafrost. Based on newly compiled databases we provide spatially distributed estimates of peatland depth and stocks of peat carbon across different biomes. These analyses reveal significant differences in peat depth and carbon stocks between peatland regions and between non-permafrost and permafrost peatlands.
