The information system of the French Peatland Observation Service: Service National d'Observation Tourbières – A valuable tool to assess the impact of global changes on the hydrology and biogeochemistry of temperate peatlands through long term monitoring

Abstract

Mitigating and adapting to global changes requires a better understanding of the response of the Biosphere to these environmental variations. Human disturbances and their effects act in the long term (decades to centuries) and consequently, a similar time frame is needed to fully understand the hydrological and biogeochemical functioning of a natural system. To this end, the ‘Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique’ (CNRS) promotes and certifies long‐term monitoring tools called national observation services or ‘Service National d'Observation’ (SNO) in a large range of hydrological and biogeochemical systems (e.g., cryosphere, catchments, aquifers). The SNO investigating peatlands, the SNO ‘Tourbières’, was certified in 2011 (https://www.sno-tourbieres.cnrs.fr/). Peatlands are mostly found in the high latitudes of the northern hemisphere and French peatlands are located in the southern part of this area. Thus, they are located in environmental conditions that will occur in northern peatlands in coming decades or centuries and can be considered as sentinels. The SNO Tourbières is composed of four peatlands: La Guette (lowland central France), Landemarais (lowland oceanic western France), Frasne (upland continental eastern France) and Bernadouze (upland southern France). Thirty target variables are monitored to study the hydrological and biogeochemical functioning of the sites. They are grouped into four datasets: hydrology, fluvial export of organic matter, greenhouse gas fluxes and meteorology/soil physics. The data from all sites follow a common processing chain from the sensors to the public repository. The raw data are stored on an FTP server. After operator or automatic processing, data are stored in a database, from which a web application extracts the data to make them available (https://data-snot.cnrs.fr/data-access/). Each year at least, an archive of each dataset is stored in Zenodo, with a digital object identifier (DOI) attribution (https://zenodo.org/communities/sno_tourbieres_data/).

Soil smoldering in temperate forests: A neglected contributor to fire carbon emissions revealed by atmospheric mixing ratios

“…To enhance the precision of our analysis regarding fire behavior during propagation, we incorporated supplementary data, specifically surface thermal anomaly information for active fire detection. This data was gathered from MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) instruments on Terra and Aqua satellites (MCD14ML) (Giglio, Louis, 2000), featuring a spatial resolution of 1 km. Additionally, we harnessed VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) data from the SNPP (Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership) and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) sources, offering a finer spatial resolution of 375 m (Schroeder et al, 2014).…”

“…Smoldering of biomass at lower moisture contents develops wider pyrolysis fronts that release a larger fraction of other gas species (Rein et al, 2009). Pyrolysis can even reach very lower MCEs with large CO emissions (Song et in France since 2016 through the peatland observation network (Bertrand et al, 2021;Gogo et al, 2021).…”

“…CC BY 4.0 License. on soils (Johnston et al, 2018) compared to the canopy (Balde et al, 2023;Fernández-Guisuraga et al, 2022) where changes in surface reflectance can be observed due to the biomass combustion during fires (Chuvieco et al, 2019) and due to the energy release detected by thermal sensors (Giglio et al, 2016;Wooster et al, 2021). Unfortunately, the information derived from aboveground assessments of fire emissions does not correlate well with soil carbon losses (Gerrand et al, 2021) due to the complex interactions between plant material and soil properties (Varner et al, 2015).…”

The origin and transfer of water and solutes in peatlands: A multi tracer assessment in the carbonated Jura Mountains

“…The site is one of the four peatlands monitored by the French National Peatland Observatory Service (SNO Tourbières, Gogo et al, 2021), and is also an observatory of the French research infrastructure for the monitoring of the CZ (OZCAR; Gaillardet et al, 2018).…”

“…This work focuses on a mid‐latitude temperate peatland located in the French Jura Mountains (840 m a.s.l., 46.826° N, 6.173° E, Figure 1). The site is one of the four peatlands monitored by the French National Peatland Observatory Service (SNO Tourbières, Gogo et al, 2021), and is also an observatory of the French research infrastructure for the monitoring of the CZ (OZCAR; Gaillardet et al, 2018).…”