The high-altitude peatland carbon cycle: A review of the impacts of climate change, human disturbance and management

Abstract

High-altitude peatlands (HAPs; defined as > 1,500 m) provide important ecosystem services including soil carbon (C) storage. However, temperatures in high-altitude regions have been rising rapidly in recent decades, while HAPs are increasingly affected by human activities such as intensive drainage and grazing. Collectively, climate change and land management may strongly affect the HAP C cycle. Here, we synthesise current global progress on the HAP C cycle, focussing on the impacts of climate change and land management. Warming increased both ecosystem respiration (ER) and methane (CH₄) emissions (26 %–86 %), while impacts on net ecosystem exchange (NEE) of CO₂ were still unclear. However, short-term drought decreased ER and CH₄ emissions (7 %–96 %), along with NEE (12 %–52 %). Snow, permafrost, and glacier decline may also impact the C cycle in HAPs, although a limited number of studies have been conducted. Grazing and vegetation degradation impacts on HAP C cycling were related to grazing and degradation intensity, while generally decreasing soil organic C stocks (3 %–51 %). Moving from shallower to deeper WTLs stimulated ER (9 %–812 %), while reducing CH₄ emissions (13 %–100 %), with variable effects on NEE (-53 %–700 %). Restoration by rewetting began to reverse the trend of drainage. We highlight several knowledge gaps, including limited understanding of climate change and land-management effects on gross primary productivity and dissolved organic carbon, while there is still limited knowledge of regional differences in HAP C cycling. Future research should focus on the interaction of land-use and climate change in HAPs, including HAP restoration, which may help future conservation of these valuable ecosystems.

Keywords

Climate warming / Drought / Permafrost and glaciers / Drainage / Restoration / Grazing

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Paul P.J. Gaffney: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Visualization, Validation, Software, Methodology, Investigation, Funding acquisition, Formal analysis, Data curation, Conceptualization. Qiuhong Tang: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Supervision, Resources, Project administration, Funding acquisition, Conceptualization. Jinsong Wang: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Investigation, Conceptualization. Chi Zhang: Writing – review & editing, Resources. Ximeng Xu: Writing – review & editing, Methodology. Xiangbo Xu: Writing – review & editing, Resources. Yuan Li: Writing – review & editing, Investigation. Sabolc Pap: Writing – review & editing, Resources. Joshua L. Ratcliffe: Writing – review & editing, Writing – original draft, Investigation. Quanwen Li: Writing – review & editing, Software, Investigation. Shuli Niu: Writing – review & editing, Resources, Conceptualization.

Declaration of competing interests

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grants No. U2243226 and 42250410326), and the Research Start-up Fund of the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research (Chinese Academy of Sciences).

Supplementary materials

Supplementary material associated with this article can be found, in the online version, at doi:10.1016/j.geosus.2025.100353 .

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