Project duration: 01.04.2025 - 31.12.2028

Project funding: DFG

Wetscapes, i.e. landscapes with a high share of water-saturated peatlands provide 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 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. Indeed, this ‘Great Rewetting’ has already begun. But evidence suggests that rewetting does not restore drained peatlands 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.

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.

Project partners:

• University of Greifswald
• University of Rostock
• IGB Berlin
• GFZ Potsdam
• Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
• Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry Jena
• Humboldt University of Berlin