Trade-offs and synergies between biodiversity and ecosystem services in restored, reforested, abandoned, and energy-producing peatlands

There is a need to optimize the use of peatlands to simultaneously reach the biodiversity, environmental goals and the economic needs. Besides raw material timber and peat, peatlands provide a variety of valuable services, such as biodiversity, C sequestration and hydrological control. High pressure is targeted to these ecosystems by e.g. forest, bioenergy and peat industries. In Finland, a country with the highest percentage cover of peatlands in the world (30% of total land area, almost 10 mill. ha), about 60% of peatland area has been drained for forestry. This had led to the degradation of biodiversity, environmental loading to watercourses, and emission of greenhouse gases (GHG). We us…