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Of all terrestrial ecosystems, peatlands store carbon most effectively in long-term scales of millennia. However, many peatlands have been drained for peat extraction or agricultural use. This converts peatlands from sinks to sources of carbon, causing approx. 5% of the anthropogenic greenhouse effect and additional negative effects on other ecosystem services. Rewetting peatlands can mitigate climate change and may be combined with management in the form of paludiculture. Rewetted peatlands, however, do not equal their pristine ancestors and their ecological functioning is not understood. This holds true especially for groundwater-fed fens. Their functioning results from manifold interactions and can only be understood following an integrative approach of many relevant fields of science, which we merge in the interdisciplinary project WETSCAPES. Here, we address interactions among water transport and chemistry, primary production, peat formation, matter transformation and transport, microbial community, and greenhouse gas exchange using state of the art methods. We record data on six study sites spread across three common fen types (Alder forest, percolation fen, and coastal fen), each in drained and rewetted states. First results revealed that indicators reflecting more long-term effects like vegetation and soil chemistry showed a stronger differentiation between drained and rewetted states than variables with a more immediate reaction to environmental change, like greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Variations in microbial community composition explained differences in soil chemical data as well as vegetation composition and GHG exchange. We show the importance of developing an integrative understanding of managed fen peatlands and their ecosystem functioning.

Schweiger, C.; Koldrack, N.; Kaehler, C., and Schuettrumpf, H., 2020. Influence of nearshore bathymetry changes on the numerical modelling of dune erosion. Journal of Coastal Research, 36(3), 545–558. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. Coastal dunes are an essential protection measure at the German Baltic Sea coastline. As the breaching of dunes during a storm is very complex and detailed data is still rare regarding the evolution, width and the depth of the breach and how the hinterland will fill through a breach and empty after drawdown, the aim of the collaborative project PADO is to investigate how a real dune breaches during a storm and how the hinterland is flooded. Within the scope of a physical model test, a large-scale research dune was built at the beach of Rostock-Warnemuende in Germany. During the modelling, the nearshore bathymetry was measured monthly and a high variability was observed. The objective of this study was to investigate the influence of a varying initial nearshore bathymetry on the results of coastal erosion modelling. Therefore, four XBeach models which differed only in nearshore bathymetry were set up and forced with a storm surge event from October 2017. The results were analyzed with regard to the computed post-storm bed level. Using the nearshore bathymetry of July and November 2017, large amounts of the research dune are eroded. The eroded sediment minor decreases when the nearshore bathymetry of September 2017 is applied. On the contrary, the sole use of freely accessible bathymetry data leads to significant decrease in the computed dune erosion. This leads to the conclusion, that the initial nearshore bathymetry can have a significant influence on the computed post-storm bed level. Especially when only freely accessible bathymetry data can be used, deviations between post-storm measurements and computed dune erosion can occur. This might be due to out-of-date data or a too coarse resolution. The results also show that pre-storm bathymetric measurement does not necessarily have to have a high resolution in order to achieve reliable results.