African peatlands: the untapped knowledge potential

Abstract

Africa hosts an enormous variety of peatland types spanning a wide range of climates. Despite their importance for biodiversity, carbon storage, water provisioning and livelihoods, African peatlands remain understudied. Here, we provide an overview of monitoring and research of African peatlands. We focus on a series of topics that reflect ongoing research efforts on peatlands worldwide, including peatland extent and depth mapping, which are still under-developed for the continent. We also highlight the scarce coverage of African peatlands in paleo-studies, including information on the timing of peatland inception, peatland carbon accumulation rates and fire paleo-records. We describe the importance of African peatlands in the Global Methane Budget, and we map greenhouse gas flux sites (chamber and eddy covariance) to understand where the data gaps in ground observations remain. We finally highlight the low level of protection given to these important ecosystems. In summary, our overview highlights large existing knowledge gaps in African peatland science, suggesting remaining questions and opportunities for research and urging funders to support the African scientific community to take up these remaining challenges that will help design best management practices for these vital ecosystems. A French translation of this abstract is available in the supplementary material. This article is part of the discussion meeting issue 'African tropical peatlands: function, value and vulnerability'.