Recent climate change has driven divergent hydrological shifts in high-latitude peatlands.

Zhang, Hui; Väliranta, Minna; Swindles, Graeme T; Aquino-López, Marco A; Mullan, Donal; Tan, Ning; Amesbury, Matthew; Babeshko, Kirill V et al. · Nat Commun · 2022

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Abstract

High-latitude peatlands are changing rapidly in response to climate change, including permafrost thaw. Here, we reconstruct hydrological conditions since the seventeenth century using testate amoeba data from 103 high-latitude peat archives. We show that 54% of the peatlands have been drying and 32% have been wetting over this period, illustrating the complex ecohydrological dynamics of high latitude peatlands and their highly uncertain responses to a warming climate.

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