CO2PEAT is a 3-year EPA research project that aims to develop a research framework to complement and enhance the current best practices for reporting national estimates of CO2 emissions and removal for peatlands in Ireland. The project will contribute to the monitoring actions under LIFE IP Peatlands and People.

The work under the CO2PEAT project is progressing to the next modelling stages as a part of research that aims to develop higher IPCC tiers / emission factors to improve methodologies for reporting and verifying terrestrial CO₂ removals and emissions from Irish peatlands.

Meanwhile, the work has already produced some important findings from the research on assessing the responses from eddy covariance (EC) CO₂ measurements from the selected peatland ecosystems and resulted in the development of a new ‘miniRECgap’ R-package tool/software. This package was developed to allow, among others, to evaluate and decide whether the application of a popular EC CO₂ flux data gap-filling approach via nonlinear environmental response functions may be suitable for the given peatland site. A publication on this work is being prepared and the package is expected to be uploaded on GitHub in near future.

Additional research needs were identified for rehabilitated former cutaway-peatlands, for which the application of some of the popular EC CO₂ flux gap-filling can be challenging, likely due to the heterogenous nature of these ecosystems represented by the presence of different vegetated areas, bare-peat and open water areas. Utilisation of suitable flux gap-filling methods is important to gain deeper insights into carbon dynamics and better understanding if the given ecosystem acts a carbon source or carbon sink.

This work resulted in the application of a shallow artificial neural network (ANN) for gap-filling the EC CO₂ flux data from a rehabilitated former Irish cutaway-peatland, which showed promising results that will be captured in a publication.

Some of the results from this research have been presented at the IGRM24 - Irish Geoscience Research Meeting in March 2024 in Galway, and at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly (EGU24) in April 2024 in Vienna, Austria.

The project's recent findings on the optimisation of shallow ANN used in EC CO₂ flux data gap-filling are expected to be presented this September at the ICOS Science Conference 2024 in France.

Dr Alina Premrov has also chaired and convened the modelling part of the session ITS1.23/SSS0.1.4 at the EGU24 in Vienna, Austria. During the EGU24 event, Dr. Alina Premrov (CO2PEAT) also met and discussed ongoing collaboration with several other external project/group members.

Visit the CO2PEAT website to learn more about their work.