Peatlands are areas of wetlands with accumulated plant material that is decomposing. Drainage of Southeast Asian peatlands causes serious environmental damage. When peatlands are drained, such as when canals are built, the water table drops, driving carbon dioxide emissions. Drained peat is more flammable and smoke from peat fires covers the region in toxic haze during dry years. Ultimately, with continued drainage, large areas will regularly flood as peatlands subside towards sea level. Despite this dangerous chain of events, few tools exist to manage the flow of water in tropical peatlands. The goal of this project is to better understand the relationship between disturbance (such as drainage or land cover change), changes to peatland hydrology, and future fire risk. This is done using new satellite data and by building models based on field measurements. The project investigates how changing precipitation patterns and disturbance each effect future fire risk. Additional research goals include the design of new types of canal networks that have less impact on fire risk and carbon dioxide emissions. The implications of the work are communicated directly to local policy makers. The project expands a climate change teacher education program for middle and high school teachers in the United States.
Over the last three decades, tropical peatlands in Southeast Asia have been disrupted by land use change and associated peatland drainage. This causes significant threats to human health (through increased peat flammability, whose smoldering fires lead to large haze events that cover the densely populated surrounding regions), infrastructure (through peat subsidence) and climate (by enabling the emissions of large quantities of stored carbon dioxide after drainage allows peat oxidation). However, the hydrology of tropical peatlands, and its implications for carbon dioxide emissions and fire risk remain poorly understood. This work builds new tools to map both peatland and drainage canals using remote sensing. These tools are combined with new hydrologic models to better understand the relationship between land use change, peatland drainage and disturbance impacts including fire risk. Field measurements are combined with remote sensing data and newly developed hydrologic models to map carbon dioxide emissions across the region, to disentangle the roles of climatic changes and land use changes on future fire risk, and to develop new tools for drainage system designs that control flooding but reduce fire risks. The results of this project are communicated directly to government officials in Brunei and Singapore. The project creates a new component of the Stanford Climate Change Education Program for middle and high school teachers. This project is funded by the Prediction of and Resilience against Extreme Events Program.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
