This project was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) with the following grant reference, NE/I015469/2, led by Dr Yit Arn Teh.

Tropical peatlands are one of the largest global soil carbon repositories and play a critical role in regulating greenhouse gas exchange between the tropical biosphere and atmosphere. Yet despite their acknowledged importance for global atmospheric chemistry, we have relatively few ground-based measurements of greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes from tropical peatlands. Whilst systematic gas flux measurements have been conducted in Indonesian peatlands, there is little or no data from Amazonian peatlands. Amazonian peatlands are spatially extensive, accounting for at least 150,000 square kilometres in the lowland Amazon; this is a land area that is approximately three-quarters the size of Indonesian peatlands, which are the most extensive tropical peatlands in the world. These ecosystems and their carbon stocks are currently under threat from anthropogenic intervention and future environmental change (e.g. land-use change, acid deposition, climate change), and yet we know little to nothing about their GHG dynamics or relative contribution to the carbon budget of the wider Amazon Basin as a whole.

The principal goal of this study was to collect preliminary measurements of methane and nitrous oxide fluxes from Amazonian peatlands, in order to take the critical first steps towards understanding the role of these ecosystems in regional and global atmospheric budgets of methane and nitrous oxide. Activities were focused on forested peatlands in the Pastaza-Marañón foreland basin (PMFB), one of the single largest contiguous peatland complexes in the Amazon Basin. The main objectives of this research were to:

1. Quantify the magnitude and range of soil methane and nitrous oxide fluxes from a sub-set of peatlands in the PMFB that represent dominant vegetation types for the wider region
2. Determine seasonal patterns of trace gas exchange
3. Establish the relationship between trace gas fluxes and environmental variables

Sampling was concentrated on the four most dominant vegetation types in the area (forested vegetation, forested [short pole] vegetation, Mauritia flexuosa-dominated palm swamp, and mixed palm swamp). GHG fluxes were captured from both floodplain systems and nutrient-poor bogs in order to account for underlying differences in biogeochemistry that may arise from variations in hydrology. Sampling was conducted during four field campaigns (two wet season, two dry season) over a 27-month period, extending from February 2012 to May 2014.