Recent climate change has driven divergent hydrological shifts in high-latitude peatlands
Hui Zhang, Minna Väliranta, Graeme T. Swindles, Marco A. Aquino‐López, Donal Mullan, Ning Tan, Matthew J. Amesbury, Kirill V. Babeshko, Kunshan Bao, Anatoly Bobrov, Viktor Chernyshov, Marissa A. Davies, Andrei‐Cosmin Diaconu, Angelica Feurdean, Sarah A. Finkelstein, Michelle Garneau, Zhengtang Guo, Miriam C. Jones, Martin Kay, Eric S. Klein, Mariusz Lamentowicz, Gabriel Magnan, Katarzyna Marcisz, Natalia Mazei, Yuri Mazei, Richard J. Payne, Nicolas Pelletier, Sanna Piilo, Steve Pratte, Thomas P. Roland, Damir Saldaev, William Shotyk, Thomas G. Sim, Thomas J. Sloan, Michał Słowiński, Julie Talbot, Liam Taylor, Andrey N. Tsyganov, Sebastian Wetterich, Xing Wei, Yan Zhao
Abstract
High-latitude peatlands are changing rapidly in response to climate change, including permafrost thaw. Here, we reconstruct hydrological conditions since the seventeenth century using testate amoeba data from 103 high-latitude peat archives. We show that 54% of the peatlands have been drying and 32% have been wetting over this period, illustrating the complex ecohydrological dynamics of high latitude peatlands and their highly uncertain responses to a warming climate.