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Peatlands are globally significant carbon stores, yet vegetation phenology at fine spatial scales remains an understudied component of peatland functioning. This limits our understanding of how these ecosystems operate and respond to environmental change.

The PeatPic Project is an international effort designed to address this gap by collecting and analysing plot-scale digital photographs from peatlands across multiple climate zones. 

Recent Can-Peat Publication: Permafrost thaw profoundly changes landscapes in the Arctic-boreal region, affecting ecosystem composition, structure, function and services and their hydrological controls. The water balance provides insights into water movement and distribution within a specific area and thus helps understand how different components of the hydrological cycle interact with each other. However, the water balances of small- (<101 km2) and meso-scale basins (101–103 km2) in thawing landscapes remain poorly understood.

Recent Can-Peat publication: Boreal peatlands across northwestern Canada with permafrost have accumulated vast amounts of carbon (C) over millennia despite regularly burning in natural wildfires. Ongoing climate change increases fire frequency and intensifies fire severity, possibly transforming the ecosystems of this vast region into long-term future C sources. Losses of C occur during wildfire but also in the years post-fire due to reduced uptake of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) by vegetation and through decomposition of exposed drier peat on the surface.