Climatic impacts of historical wetland drainage in Switzerland

Schneider, N.; Eugster, Werner

doi:10.1007/s10584-006-9120-8

Cited by 19 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…In total, drainage has probably reduced peat thickness by 1.3 m, a value similar to that reported by Aerni (1980) for the Swiss Seeland region from 1880 to 1960 (see, e.g. Schneider & Eugster, 2007 for more details on these land-use changes). With respect to the overall R eco losses of 1435 g C m À2 yr À1 (mean of 3 measurement years, see R eco a in Table 3), the fraction of respiration that can be related to drainage activities varies between 35% and 63%.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 84%

“…To achieve this goal, we selected the Rigi Seebodenalp site, an extensively used grassland in the Swiss pre‐Alps on high‐organic soils that were drained for agricultural use starting in the late 19th century. This type of historical land‐use change from blanket peat bog wetlands that were drained for agricultural use that began in the mid‐19th century is very typical for Switzerland and is considered to influence the local and regional climate well beyond the extent of the drained areas (see Schneider & Eugster, 2007 and references therein).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Impact of past and present land‐management on the C‐balance of a grassland in the Swiss Alps

Rogiers

Conen

Furger

et al. 2008

Global Change Biology

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Grasslands cover about 40% of the ice-free global terrestrial surface, but their quantitative importance in global carbon exchange with the atmosphere is still highly uncertain, and thus their potential for carbon sequestration remains speculative. Here, we report on CO 2 exchange of an extensively used mountain hay meadow and pasture in the Swiss pre-Alps on high-organic soils (7-45% C by mass) over a 3-year period (18 May 2002-20 September 2005, including the European summer 2003 heat-wave period. During all 3 years, the ecosystem was a net source of CO 2 (116-256 g C m À2 yr À1 ). Harvests and grazing cows (mostly via C export in milk) further increased these C losses, which were estimated at 355 g C m À2 yr À1 during 2003 (95% confidence interval 257-454 g C m À2 yr À1 ). Although annual carbon losses varied considerably among years, the CO 2 budget during summer 2003 was not very different from the other two summers. However, and much more importantly, the winter that followed the warm summer of 2003 observed a significantly higher carbon loss when there was snow (133 AE 6 g C m À2 ) than under comparable conditions during the other two winters (73 AE 5 and 70 AE 4 g C m À2 , respectively). The continued annual C losses can most likely be attributed to the long-term effects of drainage and peat exploitation that began 119 years ago, with the last significant drainage activities during the Second World War around 1940. The most realistic estimate based on depth profiles of ash content after combustion suggests that there is an 500-910 g C m À2 yr À1 loss associated with the decomposition of organic matter. Our results clearly suggest that putting efforts into preserving still existing carbon stocks may be more successful than attempts to increase sequestration rates in such high-organic mountain grassland soils.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 85%

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 84%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Impact of past and present land‐management on the C‐balance of a grassland in the Swiss Alps

Rogiers

Conen

Furger

et al. 2008

Global Change Biology

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“…Since the twentieth century, more than 50% of wetlands in parts of North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand have been degraded or lost due to climate change or anthropogenic disturbance (Hu et al, 2017), which have affected climate systems with extensive and intensive influence at different scales. At the global scale, wetland drainage may exert influence on global climate through changes of CO 2 and CH 4 emissions (Chen & Tian, 2007;Erwin, 2009;Pielke et al, 2011;Rojstaczer & Deverel, 2013;Schneider & Eugster, 2007;Song et al, 2009). At local to regional scale, wetland reclamation could result in more significant warming and drying effects.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Impacts of Wetland Reclamation and Paddy Field Expansion on Observed Local Temperature Trends in the Sanjiang Plain of China

Liu

Zhang

2019

JGR Earth Surface

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The warming or cooling effects on regional climate in response to early land use change may be strengthened, weakened, or eliminated by the same or opposite effect in the subsequent land use/management period. Taking the Sanjiang Plain in China as our study area, this paper analyzed the surface temperature change due to land use/land management changes from the mid‐1950s to 2015, based on the land surface temperature response model and the observation minus reanalysis (OMR) method using remote sensing data, meteorological observation data, and reanalysis data. Results revealed a magnitude of monthly mean land surface warming up to 1.31 °C due to the land use change from wetland to rain‐fed farmland and a cooling effect of −1.32 °C caused by the land management change from rain‐fed farmland to paddy fields during the growing season. The trends were confirmed using OMR method. Land surface temperature change based on remote sensing data was divided into radiative and nonradiative forcing. The nonradiative processes play a dominant role in regulating the local surface temperature. The monthly mean temperature differences in response to land use changes differ greatly during the growing season. The temperature difference was greater in May and June (spring) than in July and August (summer). Our study shows that the land use impact on regional climate could be switched dramatically, and it would be basically consistent with the impact of natural wetlands before reclamation in our study area right now, which provides important information for mitigating and adapting to global climate change at regional scale.

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“…FLEXPART-COSMO was driven by operational analysis fields as generated hourly by the Swiss national weather service, Me-teoSwiss, for western Europe (approximately −10 to 20 • E and 38 to 55 • N) with a horizontal resolution of approximately 7 km × 7 km. Hourly analysis fields are produced applying an observational nudging technique (Schraff, 1997) to near-surface and vertical profile observations of pressure, relative humidity and wind. The use of a high-resolution transport model in regional-scale inversions based on point observations is a prerequisite to reduce the representation uncertainty of the model (Tolk et al, 2008;Pillai et al, 2011).…”

Section: Transport Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Validation of the Swiss methane emission inventory by atmospheric observations and inverse modelling

Henne¹,

Brunner²,

Oney³

et al. 2015

Preprint

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Abstract. Atmospheric inverse modelling has the potential to provide observation-based estimates of greenhouse gas emissions at the country scale, thereby allowing for an independent validation of national emission inventories. Here, we present a regional scale inverse modelling study to quantify the emissions of methane (CH4) from Switzerland, making use of the newly established CarboCount-CH measurement network and a high resolution Lagrangian transport model. Overall we estimate national CH4 emissions to be 196 ± 18 Gg yr−1 for the year 2013 (1σ uncertainty). This result is in close agreement with the recently revised "bottom-up" estimate of 206 ± 33 Gg yr−1 published by the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment as part of the Swiss Greenhouse Gas Inventory (SGHGI). Results from sensitivity inversions using alternative prior emissions, covariance settings, baseline treatments, two different inverse algorithms (Bayesian and extended Kalman Filter), and two different transport models confirms the robustness and independent character of our estimate. According to the latest "bottom-up" inventory the main CH4 source categories in Switzerland are agriculture (78 %), waste handling (15 %) and natural gas distribution and combustion (6 %). The spatial distribution and seasonal variability of our posterior emissions suggest an overestimation of agricultural CH4 emissions by 10 to 20 % in the most recent national inventory, which is likely due to an overestimation of emissions from manure handling. Urban areas do not appear as emission hotspots in our posterior results suggesting that leakages from natural gas disribution are only a minor source of CH4 in Switzerland. This is consistent with rather low emissions of 8.4 Gg yr−1 reported by the SGHGI but inconsistent with the much higher value of 32 Gg yr−1 implied by the EDGARv4.2 inventory for this sector. Increased CH4 emissions (up to 30 % compared to the prior) were deduced for the north-eastern parts of Switzerland. This feature was common to most sensitivity inversions, which rules out an artefact of the transport model and the inversion system. However, it was not possible to assign an unambiguous source process to the region. The observations of the CarboCount-CH network provided invaluable and independent information for the validation of the national bottom-up inventory. Similar systems need to be sustained to provide independent monitoring of future climate agreements.

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Climatic impacts of historical wetland drainage in Switzerland

Cited by 19 publications

References 31 publications

Impact of past and present land‐management on the C‐balance of a grassland in the Swiss Alps

Impact of past and present land‐management on the C‐balance of a grassland in the Swiss Alps

Impacts of Wetland Reclamation and Paddy Field Expansion on Observed Local Temperature Trends in the Sanjiang Plain of China

Validation of the Swiss methane emission inventory by atmospheric observations and inverse modelling

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