African peatlands: the untapped knowledge potential

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'.

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Publication Details

Journal
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences
Published
2026-08-20
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2024.0485
Citations
1
Primary Topic
Peatlands and Wetlands Ecology
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
6.85

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article

African peatlands: the untapped knowledge potential

Frank Kansiime, Angela Gallego‐Sala, Yuwan Wang, Michel Mbasi et al.
1 citations
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences
Peatlands and Wetlands Ecology
6.85
article

African peatlands: the untapped knowledge potential

Frank Kansiime, Angela Gallego‐Sala, Yuwan Wang, Michel Mbasi, Fabiola Murguia-Flores, David Were, Caroline Signori‐Müller, Charles Jjuuko, Juliette Bernard, Joe R. Melton, R. Scott Winton, Antje Uhde, Jade Skye, Kemen Austin, Elise Dehaen, Jo Snöälv, Ana Abrahamsen, Carol Kagaba Kairumba, Gérard Imani
article en
1 citations

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'.

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological SciencesVol. 381(1956)
The Nature Conservancy (US), Environment and Climate Change Canada (CA), The University of Queensland (AU), University of California, Santa Cruz (US), University of Exeter (GB), Université Officielle de Bukavu (CD), Institute of Geology and Geophysics (CN), Queensland Department of Environment and Science (AU), Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (DE), Government of Uganda (UG), Université de Kisangani (CD), Makerere University (UG), Friedrich Schiller University Jena (DE), Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (MX)
European Space Agency, Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, H2020 European Research Council
Openalex Percentile: Top 3%
Peatlands and Wetlands Ecology
6.85
DOIOpen Access PDFOpenAlex
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