Exmoor / Dartmoor Mires Project

Funder: NERC, South West Water

Working with: Professor Richard Brazier, South West Water and various partners

Postdoctoral fellow: Dr David Luscombe, Dr Naomi Gatis

 

Summary: This is a long-term monitoring project seeks to establish an evidence base for the effectiveness of moorland restoration across Exmoor and at local sites within Dartmoor, both of which are upland moorland systems in the South West of the UK. The project has been running since 2010 and is on-going. The project involves a number of monitoring sites, where high-resolution sensor networks are deployed to quantify changes in water table depths, as a function of restoration (primarily ditch blocking) alongside fluxes of sediment, carbon and GHG‘s from the landscape.

 

My role in this project is to deliver a  spatial monitoring programme to chart the changes in the peatland structure and function before / during / after restoration. We have used ground-based and airborne LiDAR, airborne thermal imaging, satellite data analysis and drone-based sensing in our work here. We work together with major stakeholders in the region to deliver evidence-based understanding of processes and trajectories of change.