Managing biodiversity in agricultural landscapes Conservation restoration and rewilding

“A survey in the EU (European Environmental Agency 2020) showed that the conservation status of protected sites belonging to the habitat category ‘Bogs, Mires and fens’ is most frequently assessed as ‘bad’ (50%). Less than 10% is considered of ‘good conservation status’. Even worse, when compared to the previous survey in 2012, more than 50% of the wetlands that already had a status of ‘unfavourable’ or ‘bad’ have continued to deteriorate. The main reasons for this negative trend are agricultural activities, land-use conversion and drainage. Wetlands are ‘areas that are inundated or saturated by water for all or part of the year to the extent that it supports soil microbes and rooted plants adapted for life in saturated soil conditions’ (Joosten 2016). Wet conditions lead to low oxygen availability in the soil and result in incomplete decomposition of dead plant material. If the water table remains sufficiently high and stable throughout the year, organic material accumulates. Organic wetland soils are called peat when the soil organic matter content is higher than 30% and the thickness of the organic layer exceeds 30 cm (Joosten et al. 2017).
The present chapter focuses on peatlands in temperate Europe. First we describe undisturbed lowland peatlands and the services they provide, which we compare to progressively degraded systems. Especially in north-western Europe, human population density and land-use intensity are so high that many of the once ubiquitous peatlands have disappeared or have severely degraded. For example, in Flanders, in the north of Belgium, approximately 95% of the peatlands that were still present in 1950 were drained for agriculture and did not survive into the twenty-first century (Decleer et al. 2016). For other European countries, estimated peatland losses for that same time period range from 60% to 84% (European Commission 2007). At the same time, we know that already in 1950, most peatlands had been lost completely due to drainage or peat-cutting in earlier periods (Leenders 1989). Exact numbers from the period before 1950 are not available but it seems reasonable to assume that north- western Europe has lost almost all of its peatlands. In less densely populated regions, for example in Northern Europe, most peatlands have been drained for forestry. For Europe as a whole, it is estimated that approximately 75 000 km2 has completely disappeared, 275 000 km2 has been drained and 320 000 km2 is still in a natural or near-natural state (Joosten et al. 2017). The large majority of the latter are nowadays found in Russia, while undisturbed peatlands in the rest of Europe only cover a fraction of their past surface. Consequently, there is a huge need not only to conserve the few remaining peatlands but also to restore degraded ones, especially because they deliver important ecosystem services.”

(Citation: Van Diggelen, R., T. Ceulemans, C. Aggenbach & W.J. Emsens (2024). Managing biodiversity in agricultural landscapes Conservation restoration and rewilding. In: Reid, N. & Smith, R. (eds.); Managing biodiversity in agricultural landscapes: Conservation, restoration and rewilding; pp. 341–368, Burleigh Dodds Science Publishing, Cambridge UK,ISBN: 978.1.80146.454.3 – http://dx.doi.org/10.19103/AS.2024.0134.19 – (Open Access) (2024))

© The Authors 2024. This is an open access chapter distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License