Peatland restoration in the Humberhead Levels

Sarah Pullein, Projects Officer for South Yorkshire, talks about the work of the Nature for Climate restoration grant on Peatland restoration in the Humberhead Levels near Doncaster.

As you make your way through the beautiful lowland bog, fluffy cotton-grass and carpets of sphagnum, it's hard to tell to the untrained eye just how degraded the bog is through peat degradation and extraction, and even after years of wonderful restoration, just how far it still has to go. Hatfield and Thorne moors, our main sites so far, are lowland raised bog, a habitat of which nearly 94% has been destroyed or damaged in the UK.

In order to protect and restore this amazing landscape you need two main things: the right water levels and the right vegetation. This makes sure that the peat does not give off CO₂ and has the right conditions to be able to grow and thrive. When a peatland is working well peatland can store an amazing amount of carbon, the world peatlands store vast amounts of carbon, twice as much carbon as all the worlds forests!

For instance, Belton Moor at the North of Hatfield was full of scrub, over twenty feet high in places, which was sucking up a lot of the water out of the peat. It also has a series of ‘grips’, shallow channels put in by the people removing peat to help the water move off site so they could remove the peat. To combat this we first removed about 90% of the scrub, leaving important areas for Nightjar, a bird we have an internationally important breeding site for, making it a Special Protection Area (SPA) under the European Birds Directive.

View of a moor on a clear blue sky day after scrub has been cleared — Belton Moor scrub clearance

Once the scrub was removed, we then peat bunded the area which helps dam up the grips that were letting the water go off site. And what a difference! The site that was once dense dry trees and scrub is now wet and boggy, a perfect area for vegetation such as cotton grass and peat forming species sphagnum to grow and starting bring the bog back into good condition.

View of a moor after restoration work and it is re-wetted and ready for plants to recolonise — Belton Moor to the north of Hatfield after peat bunding, ready for vegetation to recolonise.

Adjustable sluices getting the water right on site

In a lot of other areas on site there is either too much water or too little water and we’re looking to create the goldilocks zone, not too wet not too dry, just right. How we deal with this will change from area to area depending on its needs. When there is too much water we can use something like our adjustable sluice which allows us to set the level at which we want the water, and the rest will flow into the adjacent ditches, which allow the vegetation to thrive.

Too little water? No problem, we can put dams into the ditches and grips that were left behind from peat extraction to help keep water on site, wetting up the dry peat so it can start to recover. If we need to set different levels at different times we can use our new tilting weirs, with rotating doors that let you set the height of the water with a twist of a crank handle.

Peat and plastic dam drain

plastic pile dam to wet up adjacent scrub

Construction of a tilting weir

Completed tilting weir

We have also been helping a local volunteer group scale up their fantastic work, with two brand new polytunnels which they are using to grow the vital sphagnum moss from specimens collected from the moor and research the best way to grow and use the sphagnum for the benefit of the bog.

two polytunnels in a field with 4 people working around the front of one. — Lindholme island polytunnels - volunteer led project

sphagnum moss in 4 compartments in a white box and the same again behind, inside the polytunnel — Sphagnum experiments in the new polytunnels

Restoring peat can be challenging but its incredibly satisfying and rewarding, and I look forward to sharing more of the teams fantastic work in the coming months!