Philip Jordan

Globally, 3%–4% of the peatland area has been drained for forestry, and in temperate oceanic regions, treeless bogs were historically converted to non‐native forest plantations. This has caused carbon‐rich peat oxidation, heightened fire risk, and water and biodiversity degradation. Restoration to open‐treeless bog through clear‐felling and re‐wetting (forest‐to‐bog) aims to reverse forestry impacts and restore biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and water quality functions. However, a comprehensive evaluation of its effectiveness and timelines is lacking. This review systematically synthesizes restoration outcomes in temperate oceanic peatlands, revealing mixed success over a multi‐decadal scale. Despite a global search, findings were geographically limited to the Irish and British Isles. Post restoration, onsite land‐atmosphere greenhouse gas (GHG) net flux approaches net‐zero within 11–13 ± 2 years (75% CI), largely driven by water table and vegetation recovery. Water chemistry initially deviates due to nutrient and trace metal release after clear‐felling but shows positive trajectories after 4–10 years; full recovery of dissolved organic carbon, ammonium nitrogen, and zinc may exceed two decades. Water table recovery occurs within 6–10 years, but full stabilization may require 20+ years. Faunal recovery, though slower, reflects trophic and habitat dependencies, significantly recovering after a decade. Legacy effects, such as harvest residue, microtopographies, and initial peatland conditions hinder restoration. Innovative methods, including surface terraforming and whole‐tree removal, promise accelerated recovery. Knowledge gaps include limited availability of long‐term GHG data, forestry full life cycle assessments, and fluvial carbon monitoring. Sustained investment, standardized monitoring protocols, and policy support are required to enhance restoration outcomes.This article is categorized under: Climate, Ecology, and Conservation > Conservation Strategies The Carbon Economy and Climate Mitigation > Benefits of Mitigation Trans‐disciplinary Perspectives > Regional Reviews

Despite long-term regulatory controls on fertiliser management that effectively close and open spreading periods, there are still ongoing stream water quality issues in agricultural catchments. Adjustments to these regulations largely relate to application rate and set-back distances from watercourses at the start of the open period to avoid sudden water quality impacts. Within this regulatory framework and using long-term datasets the aim of this study was to investigate the relative importance of weather, land use and policy effects on stream water quality during the first weeks of the open spreading period. Fortnightly stream water samples were collected over 2009-2023 in twenty-four agricultural sub-catchments of major Northern Ireland rivers. Random Forest Regression models were developed to predict baseline stream water total phosphorus (TP), soluble reactive phosphorus (SRP) and total oxidised nitrogen (TON) concentrations. Results showed that weather and land use were the primary drivers of changes in phosphorus concentrations while land use was the primary driver of changes in TON concentrations. Furthermore, weather was a more important driver of changes in nutrient concentrations in the more intensively farmed sub-catchments. In the less intensive sub-catchments, land use was at least 30% (for TP) to 85% (for TON) more important than the weather and policy predictors for explaining these changes. The study highlights the need to reduce the nutrient source pressure as a more effective step to improve water quality compared to small adjustments to fertiliser spreading protocols. It further supports the need to ensure slurry is spread when weather conditions are appropriate and for policy reviews to account for changes in weather pressures.

Phosphorus (P) remaining in the farming system after accounting for all P inputs (chemical fertilisers, imported slurry/manure, concentrate feed) and offtakes (agricultural products, exported slurry/manure) can be summarised as the farmgate P balance (FPB). If FPB is in surplus, P can be immediately vulnerable to runoff and also to become part of a legacy soil P store that can have longer term diffuse pollution consequences. The FPB scaled to Northern Ireland was investigated against national water quality datasets from one hundred and one rivers over 18-years. National FPBs ranged from 8.7 – 15.1 kg P/ha/yr over that period. Ninety-three of the river sites were used for Water Framework Directive (WFD) reporting of baseline soluble reactive P (SRP) concentrations. Total P (TP) data from eight major rivers were combined with river discharge for large catchment area (4,836 km2) estimates of TP load to the 304 km2 Lough Neagh lake basin where lake TP is a WFD reporting requirement. River TP loads were normalised to annual flow-weighted mean concentrations (FWMC). Based on conceptual models of ‘catchment memory’ and rivers as ‘jerky conveyor belts’ of material movement, the study found a linear 1-year lag between annual FPB and mean annual baseline SRP concentration in the ninety-three river sites, and a 5-year lag between FPB and TP FWMC in the eight major rivers. The differences were explained by soluble and particulate P partitioning and fate between source and receptors. The linear model suggested that river SRP would need a stronger FPB to aim for the good/high SRP boundary (upper quartile 0.037 mg/L) to meet a river FWMC TP concentration (0.109 mg/L) that would approach the lake’s WFD TP moderate/good boundary (0.044 mg/L) in the absence of internal lake P loading. The analysis suggested that the FPB would need to be 5.5 kg/ha/yr, or half the current balance, to meet these targets in the absence of other non-FPB sources. Addressing these non-FPB sources of P pollution in the Lough Neagh catchment and Northern Ireland more generally (38% considered to be from urban and rural sewered populations), would either speed up and attain higher water quality targets, or relieve the burden to agriculture if a slightly higher FPB target was used.

The use of high-frequency water quality monitoring has increased over several decades. This has mostly been motivated by curiosity-driven research and has significantly improved our understanding of hydrochemical processes. Despite these scientific successes and the growth in sensor technology, the large-scale uptake of high-frequency water quality monitoring by water managers is hampered by a lack of comprehensive practical guidelines. Low-frequency hydrochemical data are still routinely used to review environmental policies but are prone to missing important event-driven processes. With a changing climate where such event-driven processes are more likely to occur and have a greater impact, the adoption of high-frequency water quality monitoring is becoming more pressing. To prepare regulators and environmental and hydrological agencies for these new challenges, this paper reviews international best practice in high-frequency data provision. As a result, we summarise the added value of high-frequency water quality monitoring, describe international best practices for sensors and analysers in the field, and evaluate the experience with high-frequency data cleaning. We propose a decision workflow that includes considerations of monitoring data needs, sensor choice, maintenance and calibration, and structured data processing. The workflow fills an important knowledge-exchange gap between research and statutory surveillance for future high-frequency water quality sensor uptake by practitioners and agencies.