At Palus Demos, our aim is to bring about real change – especially for farmers and industry.
That’s why, over the coming months and years, we will be publishing “practice abstracts” on our site. These are short, user-friendly summaries of practical information or outcomes from a project, research or study.
They’re designed for farmers, advisors or businesses who want quick, applicable takeaways without reading a full academic report. Our practice abstracts focus on:
- What the practice is
- Why it is useful
- How it can be implemented
Our first set of practice abstracts come from a range of Palus Demos partners in the UK, Netherlands and Ireland:
- Arable crops: Christopher Evans of Natural England writes about demonstrating paludiculture with arable crops on an artificially raised water table. Christopher approaches this using UK Government higher-level countryside stewardship specifications.
- Challenges: Marelle van der Snoek and Peter van der Maas of Van Hall Larenstein University of Applied Sciences write on the importance of scaling up paludiculture in Dutch peat meadows and the financial challenges in doing this, before pointing towards solutions.
- Construction: Aldert Van Der Weeren of Stichting Wetlands Products and Mieke Oostra of the University of Applied Science Utrecht write about the potential of biobased building and insulation material from paludiculture biomass.
- Oswin Van Der Scheer of the University of Amsterdam, writing in both English and Dutch, explains how paludiculture can benefit ecosystems by improving water quality and biodiversity.
- Emissions and AI: Julia Marinissen of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam explains how a study measuring CO2 and CH4 from a common bulrush paludiculture site can help assess the influence of seasonality, plant growth and diurnal rhythms on emissions. This knowledge will be used to develop a Palus Demos AI tool for farmers to understand the potential emissions reduction if they were to transition to paludiculture.
- Monitoring: Chris Field of Manchester Metropolitan University and James O’Brien of Natural England write about installing dipwells for water table monitoring.
- Hydrology: Mike Longden of the Lancashire Wildlife Trust has a short piece on how to manage hydrology at a field scale and how this can feed into a landscape scale approach.
- Weirs: We’ve three contributions from Arthur Devine, Technical Programme Manager for the EU Life Integrated Project – Peatlands and People at Bord na Móna. In the first of these, Arthur writes about Bord na Móna has developed a process to install corrugated plastic weirs using a digger attachment, significantly reducing the costs traditionally associated with weir placement.
- Rehabilitation: Arthur then explains the steps involved in peatland rehabilitation, based on extensive evidence and experience from Bord na Móna.
- Drones and GIS: Finally, Arthur writes about cost-effective validation of peatland rehabilitation via drones and geographic information systems (GIS).
We hope these practice abstracts will be an accessible and useful resource. You’ll find them all here, in our document library
For any queries, please contact us at communications@palusdemos.com
