Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Peatlands and other organic soils occupy a small fraction of the land surface but store a large share of global soil carbon, and drainage and fire in these systems are major, poorly mapped sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Remote sensing enables global monitoring of organic-soil disturbance, but few globally consistent systems link organic-soil extent, disturbance activity, and emissions at high spatial resolution. Here we develop a nominal 30 m (0.00025°) global framework that overlays an organic-soil extent map with multi-temporal land-cover, infrastructure, plantation, peat-extraction, and burned-area data to delineate disturbed organic soils. Using IPCC Wetlands Supplement (Tier 1) methods, we estimate CO 2 , CH 4 , N 2 O, and CO emissions over 2001–2024. The baseline uses an operational organic-soil extent from an ensemble probability layer, thresholded separately within tropical, boreal, and temperate IPCC climate domains. Because mapped organic-soil extent is a primary determinant of disturbed area and emissions, we interpret this baseline as a spatially explicit monitoring estimate rather than as a definitive global total. In the baseline configuration, disturbed organic soils emitted about 2.6 Gt CO 2 e yr − 1 (2.5–2.7 Gt CO 2 e yr − 1 across five inventory periods), with roughly three-quarters from drainage and one-quarter from fires. Emissions are heavily concentrated in a few countries and land uses, led by Indonesia and Russia, with the tropics contributing the largest share. The leading drained land-use sources are settlement/built-up pixels, oil palm, and forest inferred as drained from nearby infrastructure, followed by cropland on organic soils. For 2021–2024, alternative extent products yield 2.6–3.3 Gt CO 2 e yr − 1 , and jointly varying the classification threshold and Tier 1 emission factors—the two dominant sources of tested variation—spans an overall scenario envelope of approximately 0.7–4.5 Gt CO 2 e yr − 1 . These estimates should be read not as a correction to existing peatland-specific estimates but as complementary, more comprehensive monitoring of disturbed organic-soil systems under a harmonized, globally consistent framework. The resulting 30 m maps of organic-soil state, disturbance, and emissions show how multi-temporal Earth observation can be combined with GHG inventory methods to identify high-emitting hotspots and support inventories, nationally determined contributions, and peatland conservation and restoration planning.
Language: English
Subfield: Ecology
Field: Environmental Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,801
OpenAlex ID: W7224887728