Abstract Peatlands are known to store significant amounts of carbon (C), nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) globally. At the regional level, however, C stocks are often poorly assessed as peat depth variability within and among different types of individual peatlands is often ignored, and nutrient stock assessments are rare or based on limited stoichiometric assumptions. Here, we provide a spatially explicit regional estimate of peat C, N and P stocks based on an extensive study of 28 temperate fens, bogs and forested peatlands using detailed peat basin bathymetry. Overall, peat depth was on average higher in bogs than in forested peatlands and fens, resulting in larger C and N stocks per unit area in bogs (237.4 kg C m −2 , 6.9 kg N m −2 ) than in forested peatlands (102.7 kg C m −2 , 3.5 kg N m −2 ) and fens (85.4 kg C m −2 , 3.7 kg N m −2 ), while P stocks were higher in forested peatlands (0.5 kg P m −2 ) than in bogs (0.4 kg P m −2 ) and fens (0.2 kg P m −2 ). Total stocks in the 1,340 km 2 region were estimated at 5.2 ± 2.1 Tg C, of 195.6 ± 92.7 Gg N, and of 18.1 ± 16.9 Gg P, with spatially distinctive patterns within the landscape. Our results demonstrate that forested peatlands are major C and nutrients reservoirs, with small, hydrologically connected forested peatlands being especially important in sequestrating P. Our work highlights the need to consider peatland basin morphometry, and direct elemental measures when estimating peat stocks at both landscape and regional scales.
Arsenault et al. (Wed,) studied this question.