Carbon farms are helping save planet
A SMALL corner of a Manchester peat bog is at the forefront of the fight against climate change.
Seven years ago, Little Woolden Moss was being ravaged by peat extractors, just to fill a cheap bag of compost for your herbaceous border.
Now the Salford Moss is not only recovering but it is at the forefront of the fight against climate change, thanks to my wonderful colleagues at the Wildlife Trust.
As one of our region’s only two per cent of remaining lowland raised peat bogs, it may not be surprising that Little Woolden Moss provides an amazing habitat for lots of rare and specialised plants and animals.
But what has it got to do with climate change?
The magic ingredient is sphagnum moss.
This wonderful little plant simply loves the wet, acidic conditions offered by peatlands and as it grows, decays and then forms peat, it turns our peatlands into globally important carbon sinks.
As sphagnum moss grows it absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis.
Then when the lower layers of sphagnum die the special conditions of the peatland mean that it decomposes extremely slowly trapping all of that carbon, with the dark peaty soils that it forms for millennia.
In fact, peatlands are able to store twice as much carbon as forests! But not all peatlands... As soon as a peatland is drained, damaged or degraded in any way all of that carbon is released back into the atmosphere, contributing to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change effects.
But here at the Wildlife Trust for Manchester we are working to stop that.
Just over the border in Lancashire, at Winmarleigh Moss, we are creating a pioneering carbon farm, taking an area of drained peatland, rewetting it and planting thousands of little plugs of sphagnum moss.
These will form a permanent cover crop with the express aim of a) stopping the release of carbon and then b) restoring its ability to absorb and store carbon from the atmosphere again.
But none of this would be possible without that aforementioned little corner of Little Woolden Moss.
It is here that a companion planting trial is underway to see which species of peatland loving plants work best alongside sphagnum to help restore and revegetate our peatlands, re-enabling them to act as those vital carbon sinks.
Sedges such as common cotton grass and hare’stail cotton grass are being grown alongside different mixes of sphagnum moss species to see which combinations will return a damaged peatland to a carbon sink the fastest.
There are at least 10 different species of sphagnum moss in the UK, all of which have slightly different properties.
Some are better at colonising areas of standing water, whilst others tolerate drier conditions more happily.
Some are better at fixing different types of nutrients into the ground.
And so, finding exactly the right mix has been a long, hard job. But working with experts from Manchester Metropolitan University and specialist sphagnum moss growers, Micropropagation Services, each different combination has been monitored to see the amounts of carbon and other greenhouse gases that were being emitted/ absorbed until the perfect mix was found.
So, what might look to you like a little patch of mossy, green bog, could very well be saving the planet for future generations.
Clever eh?