While often overlooked, peatlands are beautiful, mysterious, important

Scientists and researchers share insights into the untapped value of wetlands in carbon storage, biodiversity

By Chloe Bennett

Thousands of acres of shrubby wetlands in the Adirondacks are part of a global climate powerhouse.

Historically dismissed as unusable land, the world’s peatlands house a diverse network of wildlife, while storing more carbon dioxide than forests. Layers of peat in the bogs are made of dead plants that did not survive wet conditions, over hundreds or thousands of years. Some peatlands stretch more than 30 feet below the ground.

In total, lands like these cover about 3% of Earth’s surface, holding more carbon than the world’s forests. Around 15% of peatlands globally have been drained or disturbed, the International Union for Conservation of Nature reports, but much of the Adirondack Park’s acres are part of the “forever wild” protected forest preserve. Shingle Shanty Preserve and Research Station outside of Long Lake has thousands of peatland acres. Other large tracts are the Bloomingdale Bog, Tupper Lake’s Spring Pond Bog and Piercefield’s Massawepie Mire. 

Four researchers and naturalists to shared insights into why we should pay attention to peatlands.

A sensory experience

Some things that are majestic at face value like Whiteface Mountain and the Adirondack peatlands can only be made special by association, learning and reverence. I have never come close to a land as dynamic as these peatlands, where rare orchids can bloom out of the muck, and where the pungent smell is one of our strongest allies against the catastrophes of climate change. These lands are personally meaningful because they have reiterated the value of surpassing outward appearances. — Saikat Chakraborty, Paul Smith’s College science professor and writer

A refuge for plants, birds

Peatlands in general are special as unique wetland systems that perform all of the wonderful ecosystem services that wetlands perform for us everywhere, but they also store large amounts of carbon. They play a major role in the global carbon balance. 

More locally, our Adirondack peatlands do all of those things but also serve as important climate change refugia. We are sitting at the border between the temperate and the boreal biogeographic zones. That means we have a mix of northern things and southern things and the northern, high-latitude elements of our flora and fauna are particularly vulnerable to a warming climate. Refugia are places that are somewhat buffered from the surrounding climate and these places can protect native species and ecosystems from the negative effects of a warming climate over short time scales and serve as havens for biodiversity over the long term.

They’re most special to me personally as the place to find some of the rarest and most iconic species of our part of New York State. These include crazy carnivorous plants like pitcher plants and sundews, charismatic mammals like our largest – the moose, and many species of birds you can’t find anywhere else in New York. On the morning of June 25 in the Osgood River Muskeg (Adirondack peatlands also have some great names,) I had palm warbler, Lincoln’s sparrow, Canada jay, olive-sided flycatcher, yellow-bellied flycatcher, and possibly black-backed woodpecker on my bird survey. Those are not your average backyard birds! — Michale Glennon, senior research scientist at the Adirondack Watershed Institute in Paul Smiths

Lands full of mystery

Part of what makes peatlands special is their mystery and intrigue. We have centuries of folklore tied to these ecosystems, warning us of the perceived dangers of these places. We’ve waged war against these ecosystems throughout human history, seeking to tame a landscape whose value we greatly underestimated. And nestled in blankets of sphagnum moss, some plants and animals defy our expectations at every turn.

In short, there is a mystery around every soggy bend of a peatland, and I spend as much time as I can trying to uncover these mysteries and bring light to the incredible benefits these ecosystems provide. They are havens for biodiversity; they are climate heroes with deep carbon stores; and they are visually stunning landscapes. — Charlie Reinertsen, naturalist and peatland photographer in Ray Brook

Unparalleled carbon-holding potential, and a source of learning

I have talked a lot about the importance of peatlands globally. They are wetlands that accumulate carbon: plants grow and die but do not decompose because of the wet and cold conditions in peatlands. This undecomposed plant material that has now been accumulating since the last ice age accounts for about one third of terrestrial global carbon — a larger carbon sink than all of the trees on the planet. The thing about peatlands though, is that they are not easy to recognize. You can drive by a wetland here in the Adirondacks and not know how deep the accumulated peat soils are. Some have greater than 33 feet of peat accumulation over acres of land and have been taking carbon, leaf by leaf through photosynthesis, from the atmosphere and holding on to it over 10 millennia in some cases — since ground buried beneath glaciers for 60 thousand years was first exposed to the warm sun. These peatlands are also important in our state because they provide a unique habitat that supports species that persist. These are the cold-tolerant species that live from the Adirondacks to the north of the Arctic Circle. The black spruce trees and the pitcher plants and the black-backed woodpeckers, boreal chickadees, the moose. Adirondack peatlands are islands of boreal biodiversity in a sea of temperate, northern hardwood forests.

Back in September of ’95, after a long season of working as a seasonal ranger in the High Peaks, I worked with a Moriah Shock prison crew that built the 2,000-foot Silver Lake Bog Preserve boardwalk for The Nature Conservancy. I fell in love with those dark wet woods then. As the only white guy on the crew (aside from the correction officers) I also learned a lot about privilege. I recall one of the inmates saying that he used to come to the Adirondacks as a kid. I asked where he would stay when he visited and he said that he was in an adjudicated youth program. 

His entire experience in the Adirondacks — the woods, lakes, and mountains that I loved and explored, for work and fun — that experience was imposed upon him by the courts. This left me questioning the origin of my “wilderness” aesthetics and the nature of my culture’s sense of nature. 

But from late September through early November, these inmates and I worked hard and took time to marvel at the crazy carnivorous plants, the bottomless muck, and the softness of the sphagnum mosses. I went to work at Whiteface for the winter and considered returning to school to study peatland ecology. They went back to their prison cells. — Stephen Langdon, director of Shingle Shanty Preserve and Research Station near Long Lake

Photo at top: A clearing at Spring Pond Bog. Photo by Tim Rowland