Towards a microbial process-based understanding of the resilience of UK peatland systems

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Peatlands are the largest store of terrestrial carbon in the UK and carbon uptake and release from these systems is highly sensitive to changes in climate and human impacts on the peatland ecosystem. This application will aim to define a series of key research questions around the contribution of UK upland peatlands to climate resilience, particularly with respect to resilience of carbon stores to drought and flood in restored and eroded landscapes. We aim to co-produce these research questions through engagement with two key academic communities and with peatlands practitioners and to define them in an authoritative state of the science paper. The project will bring together a multidisciplinary group of peatlands scientists, microbiologists and peatland management practitioners. Other key outputs will be a Prioritised Research Plan and a Stakeholder Guidance document. While there has been work on the impact of upland restoration on peatland carbon dynamics, the process understanding of the links between climate change, flood, drought and peatland carbon storage is limited, and the potential connection with climate resilience is unclear. The processes governing carbon store resilience are predominantly microbial, requiring collaboration between microbiologists and the well-established communities of peatlands scientists and practitioners. Through considering the role of microbes in driving the resilience of the carbon store in peatlands the proposal addresses objective 1, knowledge gap 2 and objective 2 of the UK Climate Resilience programme.We are requesting £45 k to define the key research questions linking microbial diversity and function to the resilience of the peatland carbon store.We propose five activities:1) convening a series of interdisciplinary workshops of leading UK and international microbiologists, peatland scientists and restoration practitioners to develop interdisciplinary research approaches to understanding peatland response to flood and drought;2) formulating a Prioritised Research Plan and a Stakeholder Guidance document from these workshops;3) work with peatland stakeholder groups to develop practical applications of the process understanding (e.g. use of microbial community data as indicators of restoration success);4) engagement with groups modelling UK climate resilience to incorporate data on uplands and upland processes into wider UK climate resilience work;and5) synthesis of the findings from these activities with a major review of the literature to define the state of the science and key research questions to develop a process based understanding of the potential role of peatlands in climate resilience.