Scotland’s Flow Country
NatureScot (2024, July 26) Scotland’s The Flow Country secures World Heritage Site status.
Key points
- Some parts of the Flow Country have been accumulating peat for more than 9,000 years, building deposits exceeding eight meters thick, according to UNESCO.
- (2008) Birds, bogs and forestry ’ revisited: The significance of the flow country controversy.
- (2016) Mapping peat in Scotland with remote sensing and site characteristics.
(2016) Blanket Mires of Caithness and Sutherland, Scotland’s Great Flow Country (UK).
The peat bogs of northern Scotland, home to more than 30 species of sphagnum moss, are spread across some 1,900 square kilometers (730 square miles) of the country’s Highlands region.
Additional details
- BBC (2020, August 3) Scotland’s 10,000-year-old wild heartland.
- Overall, scientists estimate that all of the world’s peatlands cover just 3 percent of Earth’s land surface but store more than 600 gigatons of carbon—about twice as much as all the world’s forests combined.
- While forests store most of their carbon in living trees—which eventually release it back into the atmosphere when they burn or die—peat bogs often store carbon for many thousands of years.
- The image above, captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on Landsat 8, is centered on blanket bogs in the Scottish Highlands, home to the largest such ecosystem in Europe.
- The unusual ecosystems, also called blanket mires and featherbed bogs, only occur in places with abundant rainfall, poor drainage, and low levels of evapotranspiration.
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