Living in Acid: NH Bogs for Global Conservation

This project is about understanding and protecting one of the planet’s most powerful, and overlooked natural climate defenses: peatlands.

Peatlands act like massive carbon vaults. Over thousands of years, waterlogged and acidic conditions slow decay, allowing layers of plant material to build up and lock away huge amounts of carbon, often more per acre than forests.  When these systems stay healthy, they help stabilize the climate. But when they dry out or are disturbed, that stored carbon can be released back into the atmosphere, accelerating climate change.

New Hampshire is uniquely positioned to lead this work on a global scale. The region’s peatlands sit at a climatic tipping point: the southern edge of northern peatland systems, making them especially sensitive to warming temperatures and shifting rainfall. That means changes happening here can serve as an early preview of what may soon occur across peatlands worldwide. If we can detect, measure, and respond to those changes in New Hampshire, we can develop tools and standards that other regions can adopt before it’s too late.

By establishing a scientifically grounded, scalable monitoring system, New Hampshire can set the benchmark for peatland conservation globally, shifting the focus from reacting to ecosystem collapse to preventing it. This has two major impacts:

• Biodiversity protection: Healthy peatlands support specialized plants and insects found nowhere else. Protecting these systems preserves entire unique ecosystems, not just individual species.
• Climate resilience: By keeping peatlands intact and waterlogged, we maintain their ability to store carbon and buffer against climate change, helping stabilize both local and global environments.

In short, this project turns New Hampshire into a living laboratory, one that can define how the rest of the world measures, understands, and ultimately protects one of Earth’s most important natural climate systems.

The purpose of this project is to create a clear, repeatable way to measure how healthy a peatland is before visible damage occurs. By combining fieldwork (like tracking insect and plant diversity, water levels, and soil chemistry) with drone-based mapping, the team will build a standardized “Peatland Integrity Index.”  This index acts like an early warning system, detecting subtle ecological shifts that signal a peatland is beginning to fail.

A key insight driving the project is that biodiversity, especially insects, can reveal problems earlier than traditional indicators. Insects respond quickly to environmental change, so declines in their diversity or activity may signal that a peatland is losing stability long before plants visibly die off or peat begins to degrade.  By treating insects as frontline indicators, the project connects biodiversity directly to climate resilience.