Introduction to Irish Peatlands
Peatlands are wetland ecosystems found on all continents, covering about 3.8% of the global surface land area with a carbon stock of up to 650 billion tonnes (UNEP, 2022). For comparison, global forests cover over 20% of global surface land area and store 373 billion tonnes of carbon (Peatland Atlas, 2023). Peatlands are persistent long-term stores of carbon due to partly decayed organic plant material accumulating as peat over thousands of years in water-logged and oxygen-poor environments. Since the plant material does not fully decay, the carbon sequestered during their lifetime is stored within the peat soil.
Peatlands provide a range of important ecosystem services to society. In addition to carbon storage and sequestration, they also regulate water resources by storing and filtering water, which helps to maintain water quality and mitigate drought and flooding. Furthermore, they support many rare and specially adapted flora and fauna, ranging from the tiny insect-eating Sundews to the sky-dancing Hen Harrier. Peatland biodiversity is vital as complex interactions between species and their habitats underpin global climate systems and local processes such as water quality and pollination (Gorman et al., 2023).
Since peat soils are most recently estimated to comprise more than 23% of Ireland’s land cover, they play an important role in Irish society (Gilet et al., 2024). Approximately 30% of Irish peatlands have undergone major land use change since 1990, and 85% have been to some extent degraded (Habib & Connolly, 2023; Fluet-Chouinard et al. 2023). When looking at all Irish wetlands, including peatlands, 90.8% are estimated to have been lost since 1700 (Fluet-Chouinard et al. 2023). Land use changes on peatlands were primarily driven by turf extraction, afforestation, and agriculture (Habib & Connolly, 2023). When peatlands are in good condition — with a high water table level and abundant Sphagnum moss — they act as carbon sinks and provide the aforementioned ecosystem services. Conversely, drained or degraded peatlands produce ecosystem disservices such as greenhouse gas emissions, biodiversity loss, and nitrogen pollution (Peat Hub Ireland Glossary – Degraded peatlands, 2025).
By the mid-21st century, Ireland’s annual average temperatures are projected to rise by up to 1.6℃ due to climate change, leading to more unpredictable, frequent, and intense extreme weather events (EPA, 2024a). These higher temperatures can increase evapotranspiration during summer periods, thus disrupting the delicate water balance needed for peat-forming Sphagnum moss species and reducing the likelihood of peat formation (Ritson et al., 2025). The generally poor condition of Ireland’s biodiversity continues to decline, and at the same time, nitrogen and phosphorus pollution are the main reason why 45% of Irish rivers and 46% of lakes are of moderate to bad quality (NPWS, 2019; EPA, 2024b). Therefore, we urgently need peatland policies that provide co-benefits and address the diverse drivers of climate change, biodiversity loss, and poor water quality (Pschenycky et al., 2021; Jaureguiberry et al., 2022; Dáil Éireann, 2019; Gorman et al., 2023).
This paper argues that evidence-based policy-making, policy take-up and social acceptance are fundamental policy elements for effective nature restoration. It also argues that science and technology – more specifically remote sensing and artificial intelligence – could be leveraged to continuously monitoring nature restoration and for reporting. Moreover, it advocates the publications and sharing of such insights – in the same space – to strengthen the three policy elements. The article showcases an example of how all this can come together, that is, by means of PeatSense, a collaborative platform for data and knowledge sharing focused on Irish peatland condition monitoring.
Nature Conservation & Climate Action Policies
In 2024, the Peat Hub Ireland project established a database of Irish peatland literature to encourage researchers, civic societies and policy-makers to more effectively investigate and plan the management of Ireland’s peatlands (Renou-Wilson et al., 2024). The project identified key evidence-based policy actions for Ireland’s peatland landscapes following a comprehensive literature review (Renou-Wilson et al., 2024). These recommended actions included raising awareness of, implementing, and enforcing existing EU directives, policy, and legislation (Renou-Wilson et al., 2024).
One example of such a policy is Ireland’s Climate Action Plan 2024, which sets targets for peatland rehabilitation and restoration, including the reduced management intensity of agricultural peat soils (Government of Ireland, 2024). Summer 2024 also saw the publication of the long-awaited EU Nature Restoration Law 2024/1991, which sets ambitious goals for each EU Member State to restore 20% of their habitats by 2023 and 50% by 2050. Member States are obliged to develop strategies to achieve, monitor, and report on the effects of the resulting activities to the European Commission. These measures would also advance progress on Ireland’s National Biodiversity Action Plan 2023-2030, which is backed by the Wildlife (Amendment) Act 2023 to create a public sector duty on biodiversity.
The Nature Restoration Law goes hand-in-hand with the Paris Agreement 2015 and other peatland-related directives, most notably the Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) Regulation 2018/841, the EU Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming Certification (CRCF) Regulation 2022/0394, and the EU Effort Sharing Regulation 2020/2016. The latter risks Ireland’s compliance costs of €20 billion — the equivalent of almost an entire year’s capital budget — should it fail to meet its 2030 carbon reduction targets (IFAC, 2024; T&E, 2024). Due to pollution from degraded peatlands, they are also a key policy area for Ireland’s River Basin Management Plans under the EU Water Framework Directive 2000/60/EC.
In addition to monitoring Ireland’s progress towards these various targets, there is a need to identify activities that degrade peatlands and to enforce legislation. Despite the 2019 High Court ban on commercial peat harvesting, several potentially illegal large-scale extraction sites are being investigated by the Environmental Protection Agency (Hickey, 2024). Additionally, although smaller-scale peat extraction for domestic use is still permitted by those with legal turbary rights (the right to cut and carry away turf from a specific plot of bogland, (Walsh&Partners, 2018)), this does not apply to Special Areas of Conservation under the EU Habitats Directive 92/43/EEC. This EU Directive is the main policy for peatland conservation sites in Ireland and was a catalyst for other influential pieces such as the National Peatlands Strategy 2015-2025. In 2024, the European Commission referred Ireland to the European Court of Justice for failure to address continued illegal turf cutting on certain designated sites (Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage, 2024).
Remote Sensing and Artificial Intelligence for Continuous Monitoring for Verification and Reporting
Continuous data collection and analysis is required to effectively monitor restoration efforts, to report on them, and adjust strategies. Moreover, to trigger prompt interventions against adverse events such as fires or illegal turf extraction, these data processes must be executed at a high temporal frequency – ideally up to a daily basis. In-situ surveying by domain experts is the most precise method of peatland monitoring. However, it faces scaling and cost issues when transitioning from site-specific to national or global continual monitoring. Remote sensing technologies can help to bridge this data gap.
Satellite imagery is a type of remote sensing technology that has the ability to capture snapshots of large surface areas at a high temporal and spatial resolution, for example every five days at up to 30-cm resolution (Copernicus, 2025; European Space Agency, 2022). However, the frequency and quality of data can be affected by persistent cloud cover in Ireland (Connolly, 2019). Since these vast amounts of data are impossible to process manually, remote sensing technologies are increasingly being combined with machine learning to identify patterns and extrapolate insights. Machine learning is a subfield or application of Artificial Intelligence (AI), where a computer model is taught to identify patterns in data.
Although it seems evident that (semi-)automated computational approaches will play an important role in achieving the monitoring capabilities required, domain expertise must not be discarded. Ground truth data, such as from in-situ ecological surveys, is vital for the implementation or training of reliable AI processes. Domain experts would also have a pivotal role in verifying the AI system outputs — albeit realistically only on a selection of them. Ground truth data can contain correlations between colour and condition (e.g. healthy Sphagnum cuspidatum moss is bright green in colour) which make it possible for the AI system to identify or learn statistical patterns. Therefore, the AI system could seek the same patterns on satellite imagery on a regular basis. Remote sensing and AI have already been used for a vast plethora of outputs, such as the National Landcover Map of Ireland (Táilte Éireann, 2018), the detection of peatland drainage (Habib et al., 2024), and the ecological mapping of Ireland’s raised bogs (Grappiolo et al., 2024).
Greenhouse gas emissions reduction and nature restoration policy targets for 2030 and 2050 require that the best available technology is employed as soon as possible, however, scientific and technological innovations are constantly improving. It is important that when higher-performing monitoring, computational, and modelling methods emerge — such as a new satellite service — the process should promptly adopt them and adjust its outputs accordingly. The more seamless these changes are, the more up-to-date the data will be for monitoring, verification and reporting. Therefore, the Agile software development methodology, based on iterative improvements and a quick response to change, is arguably the most suitable development methodology to fulfil the needs required (Bhagyashree, 2022; Mallidi, 2024).
Figure 1. How domain experts, remote sensing and artificial intelligence can realise continual monitoring and verification.
Collaboration & Knowledge-Sharing in Evidence-Based policy-making
Another action recommended by the Peat Hub Ireland project was the need for collaborative and equitable partnership approaches, data access, as well as a new paradigm of knowledge co-production and open science (Renou-Wison et al., 2024). In order to meet Ireland’s climate and biodiversity targets, measures will need to be taken on state, semi-state, and private land. Effective stakeholder engagement and data governance can increase the social acceptability and take-up of these measures.
Private land is a particularly important area of action as, under current estimates, agricultural peat soils cover up to 339,000 ha and release an estimated 3.9 million t/CO2eq/year (EPA, 2024). As a result, grassland is the second largest emissions source in the Land Use, Land Use Change, and Forestry category of the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory (EPA, 2024c). Reducing emissions from peat soils is vital if Ireland is to meet its 2030 emissions reduction targets (CCAC, 2021). Farming organisations have publicly expressed concern about the potential impact of water table management on agricultural land and farm productivity in national media (Lynch, 2023; Meehan, 2024). Fortunately, results-based agri-environmental schemes have made traction in piloting methodologies and improving farmers’ perceptions of nature-friendly management of peatlands and agricultural peat soils (Farrell et al., 2024; FarmPEAT, 2024; WAN, 2024).
In order to increase the social acceptability or take-up of conservation measures, all stakeholders and local landowners must be involved in a participative rather than consultative fashion (Teagasc, 2021, 2024; Aarhus Convention, 1998). It is of paramount importance that current policies do not repeat the errors of the past. More particularly, when the designation of 53 Irish bogs as Natura 2000 sites began in the mid-1990s under the EU Habitats Directive 92/43/EEC, peatlands were largely valued as an energy source or non-productive land in need of drainage (Farrell et al., 2024). These extractive uses were at odds with conservation values and led to conflicts with local landowners and turf cutters due to inadequate stakeholder engagement in areas designated for conservation (Farrell et al., 2024; O’Riordan et al., 2014).
A valuable tool to connect stakeholders to policy-making and conservation work would be to make monitoring and scientific data digestible to a non-expert audience. Furthermore, these same outputs could be leveraged by governments for evidence-based policy-making on peatland conservation and restoration (Government of Ireland, 2019). One way to promote data access and open science is a collaborative platform for peatland condition monitoring together with knowledge and data sharing, such as PeatSense (Peatsense.org, 2024).
Linking Continuous Monitoring and Evidence-Based policy-making
PeatSense is intended to be open and useful to anyone in need of peatland data and information, including policy-makers, government bodies, researchers, landowners, civil society, and the general public. It is designed to continuously acquire satellite imagery which is then passed to a collection of AI processes to produce maps depicting aspects of peatland condition, such as the ecology of raised bogs and areas of exposed peat soils (Grappiolo et al., 2024). When combined with other scientific elements, such as site conditions and carbon fluxes, these maps can help to identify and prioritise areas for restoration (Regan et al., 2020). All AI models currently deployed are trained on ground truth data from the National Parks and Wildlife Service. Moreover, all AI models are also validated by domain experts to assess their reliability and accuracy.
The platform allows verified users to share their own data, algorithms and knowledge. For instance, PeatSense hosts the most recent map of peat soils — the Irish Peat Soil Map (Gilet et al., 2024). There is also scope to use these maps to generate draft reports using Natural Language Processing and Generative AI. Natural Language Processing and Generative AI can tailor reports with technical or non-technical language for ecologists, regulators, and non-experts, all from the same data and information that is stored on the platform. The PeatSense directory guides users to other resources such as peatland experts, groups, projects, funding opportunities, factsheets, and reports. PeatSense is meant to be accessible to all, including non-experts, so has a simple Graphical User Interface which is being continuously refined.
At a landscape scale, the implementation of peatland policy will require a continuous updating of the condition of these landscapes, and so the methodologies being employed in PeatSense can assist in providing the data required. Furthermore, data-driven monitoring and reporting models of landscape condition, such as those on PeatSense, can help to deliver the land observatory instrument to implement the European Landscape Convention (ETS No. 176) to which Ireland is a signatory (Galan, 2024). These observatories can follow different frameworks, but in essence, a data repository and bridging platform like PeatSense can help to mediate connections between the government, civil society, researchers, and the private sector (Pschenycky et al., 2021; Galan, 2024). Although PeatSense is not currently aiming to be a social network facilitating direct communication between users, the generated reports and directory of peatland stakeholders could set the basis for more collaborative partnerships as recommended by Peat Hub Ireland (Renou-Wilson et al., 2024).
Figure 2. The scientific evidence, needed for reporting to the EU and arising from continual monitoring and verification (see Figure 1), is the key for evidence-based policy-making.
Conclusions
There is now a good understanding of the role that well-functioning ecosystems have in all aspects of society, such as clean water, carbon storage and biodiversity, hence the adoption of the EU Nature Restoration Law, and a range of climate and biodiversity related policies, that aim to protect and restore them. However, there are outstanding questions regarding monitoring and verification methods to ensure prompt, targeted interventions. Although cloud cover issues continue to pose a challenge, PeatSense is an example of how machine learning and remote sensing data – e.g. satellite imagery – could scale up peatland condition monitoring for use by different stakeholders and as scientific evidence for policy-making. The use of machine learning and Artificial Intelligence is still a novel tool in Irish peatland conservation, hence the models developed for PeatSense are an innovative and promising methodology. In addition, by acting as a data repository and directory, PeatSense can improve awareness of, and connectivity between, the different research and projects implementing these policies.
By expanding the range of habitat types being analysed and reported on, the methodology of could be applied to the wider landscape beyond peatlands. Depending on the resolution and type of remote sensing technology being used, the analysis can be tailored to suit a variety of end uses. Such observation and reporting will, no doubt, assist in our management and stewardship of the Irish landscape and be a tool for landowners, citizens, researchers, and policy-makers.
Acknowledgements
This publication has partly emanated from research conducted with the financial support of Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland under Grant number 22/NCF/FD/10969. Corrado thanks Steven Owens (University of Strathclyde, Scotland) for the valuable discussions on nature-based regulations and the role remote sensing could have in monitoring, verification and reporting.
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