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. 2021 Mar 7;50(11):2038–2049. doi: 10.1007/s13280-021-01520-2

Great Vasyugan Mire: How the world’s largest peatland helps addressing the world’s largest problems

Sergey N Kirpotin 1,2,✉, Olga A Antoshkina 3, Alexandr E Berezin 2, Samer Elshehawi 4, Angelica Feurdean 5, Elena D Lapshina 6, Oleg S Pokrovsky 8, Anna M Peregon 1,7, Natalia M Semenova 2, Franziska Tanneberger 9, Igor V Volkov 10, Irina I Volkova 2, Hans Joosten 9
PMCID: PMC8497674  PMID: 33677811

Abstract

Peatlands cover 3% of the land, occur in 169 countries, and have—by sequestering 600 Gt of carbon—cooled the global climate by 0.6 °C. After a general review about peatlands worldwide, this paper describes the importance of the Great Vasyugan Mire and presents suggestions about its protection and future research. The World’s largest peatland, the Great Vasyugan Mire in West-Siberia, forms the border between the Taiga and the Forest-Steppe biomes and harbours rare species and mire types and globally unique self-organizing patterns. Current oil and gas exploitation may arguably be largely phased out by 2050, which will pave the way for a stronger focus on the mire’s role in buffering climate change, maintaining ecosystem diversity, and providing other ecosystem services. Relevant new research lines will benefit from the extensive data sets that earlier studies have gathered for other purposes. Its globally unique character as the ‘largest life form on land’ qualifies the Great Vasyugan Mire in its entirety to be designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance.

Keywords: Biodiversity, Carbon cycle, Ecosystem services, Paris Agreement, West-Siberia, World Heritage

Introduction

Urgent action at an unprecedented scale is necessary to combat climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation, and air, land and water pollution; to improve resource management, and to prevent and manage risks and disasters (UN Environment 2019). These global challenges have enhanced our appreciation for ‘nature-based solutions’ (Cohen-Shacham et al. 2016). Two particularly influential agreements in this respect are the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) with the Paris Agreement (2015), and the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity with its Aichi Targets and the post 2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2015) recognizes that ending worldwide poverty must go hand-in-hand with improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth—all while tackling climate change and working to preserve our biodiversity. The 2021–2030 UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration will aim in particular to restore a huge extent of degraded ecosystems, including peatlands.

Peatlands have for centuries been lacking recognition because of their presumed insignificance, their invisibility, and the adverse associations they generate. Recently, however, they increasingly receive appraisal for the ecosystem services they provide (Bonn et al. 2016). In March 2019, the United Nations Environment Assembly, the world’s highest-level decision-making body on the environment, adopted a resolution on ‘Conservation and Sustainable Management of Peatlands’ (UNEP/EA.4/L.19), which urges Member States and other stakeholders “to give greater emphasis to the conservation, sustainable management and restoration of peatlands worldwide…”.

This paper illustrates how peatlands act as significant sinks and stores of carbon and water, play a vital role as climate-regulators both on a global and regional scale, and are safe-havens for a unique biodiversity. Set within a global perspective, the paper has a special focus on West-Siberia, the World’s largest peatland concentration, and especially on the Great Vasyugan Mire, the World’s largest peatland, which had thus far little exposure outside Russia and the peatland community. Our goal is to highlight the nature-based solutions that peatlands offer and to evoke new research ideas to maximize the global societal benefits that peatlands provide.

This paper contributes to a series of studies on Siberian environmental change (Callaghan et al. 2021).

Peatlands at a global scale

Peatlands are the only (semi-)terrestrial ecosystems where plant productivity is persistently larger than decay and organic material keeps accumulating as layers of ‘peat’. A humid climate and a flat topography facilitate the permanent water saturation that peat accumulation requires, which explains the prevalence of peatlands in the lowlands of Arctic, sub-Arctic, boreal and temperate-oceanic regions and of the humid Tropics. Cool conditions impede both productivity and decomposition, but—often more importantly—also limit evapotranspiration, so that in cold climates peatlands abound in areas with much less precipitation than in warm climates, e.g. in the Arctic tundra where annual precipitation is less than in most of the world’s largest deserts.

Peatlands cover c. 4 million km2, i.e. 3% of the land area of our planet, and occur in at least 169 (88%) out of 193 UN member states (Joosten 2009). Globally, peatlands contain some 600 ± 100 Gt of carbon in their peat (Gorham 1991; Vompersky et al. 1994; Page et al. 2011; Dargie et al. 2017; Yu et al. 2019), i.e. 30% of the global soil carbon is found on only 3% of the global land (Scharlemann et al. 2014). This makes peatlands one of the most important long-term carbon stores in the terrestrial biosphere. They are also very space-efficient: in the boreal zone, peatlands contain on average seven times more carbon per km2 than any other ecosystem, in the Tropics even ten times more (Parish et al. 2008). Whereas the world in the past 1000 years has lost 90 Gt of soil carbon from 55 million km2 of agricultural land (Sanderman et al. 2017), the world’s peatlands simultaneously sequestered at least the same amount of carbon on less than 10% of that area (Gorham 1991; Parish et al. 2008; Frolking et al. 2011).

In natural peatlands, peat accumulation and carbon sequestration result from the imbalance between gains (by photosynthesis) and losses (primarily by decay) of organic material. The accumulation rate differs strongly from place to place, depending on climate, hydrology and hydrochemistry. In general, peat accumulation increases from nutrient rich to nutrient poor, from polar to equatorial, and from continental to oceanic conditions (Botch et al. 1995; Feurdean et al. 2019). The present-day rate of carbon sequestration in the peatlands of the world is less than 100 Mt carbon per year and shows considerable year-to-year variability (Parish et al. 2008; Frolking et al. 2014). Nevertheless, even with these slow rates, the world’s natural peatlands have, over time, decreased the atmospheric CO2 concentration by about 50 ppmv CO2 and have—in spite of their methane emissions—lowered radiative forcing by about 0.7 W m−2 (Frolking et al. 2011; Günther et al. 2020). This has led to an overall cooling of the global climate by ~ 0.6 °C (IPCC 2013).

Mires provide also many other ecosystem services critically important for human well-being (Bonn et al. 2016). These services include, amongst others, purification of fresh water (e.g. from heavy metals and other pollutants, Volkova et al. 2010), reduction of flood risks, and evaporative cooling of the local and regional climate (Worrall et al. 2019). In addition, peatlands constitute important palaeo-environmental archives holding a wealth of micro- and macrofossils, including priceless relics such as the ‘bog bodies’ (Sanders 2009).

Peatlands have a distinct diversity of specialised, rare and endangered species and maintain—by accommodating migrating species—biodiversity far beyond their borders. As one of the last wildernesses, they increasingly provide refugia for species that are expelled from their non-peatland habitat (Minayeva et al. 2017). The sophisticated interaction of plants, peat and water allows for the long-term development of self-regulation and self-organisation, making peatlands into coherent and persistent ecosystems with intricate surface patterning and a unique biodiversity of mire types and ecosystems (Joosten et al. 2017; Sirin et al. 2018).

Threats to peatlands

More than 80% of the global peatland area is still in a largely natural state, but drainage and transformation to farmland, grazing land, forestry land, peat extraction areas or infrastructure facilities have affected c. 650 000 km2 (Joosten et al. 2016). Transformation used to occur mainly in northern latitudes but currently increasingly takes place in the Tropics. In many European countries the vast majority of peatlands is drained, including Germany (98%), The Netherlands (95%), Denmark (93%), and Ireland (82%) (Tanneberger et al. 2017). The enormous extent of peatlands in Russia is the reason that ‘only’ half of the European peatland area has been drained. The Soviet Union was, however, far from restrictive in its peatland use: in terms of drained area and volume of extracted peat, the country was even world leader, associated with an explicit negative attitude towards these ecosystems (Kopenkina 2015; Bruisch 2018). By the end of the twentieth century, some 69 000 km2 of peatlands in the territories of the former Soviet Union had been drained and degraded by human agency. Degradation especially affected European Russia, while vast peatland areas in Siberia remained intact (Bruisch 2018).

With drainage, peatlands become subject to increased microbial peat oxidation, changing them from carbon-accumulating ecosystems to sources of greenhouse gases (GHG), including carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, and—from ditches—also methane (Joosten et al. 2016; Feurdean et al. 2019). The drier conditions also increase their flammability and the incidence of fire. Besides GHG emissions, the smouldering fires on drained peatland cause widespread haze (Hu et al. 2018) with deleterious effects on human health (Marlier et al. 2019). In the boreal zone, the highly flammable, fire-adapted tree species facilitate forest and surface peatland fires as a natural phenomenon, which may even add to peat formation (Leifeld et al. 2018; Flanagan et al. 2020). However, the increased frequency and severity of peat fires following anthropogenic and climate-induced lowering of the water table level create important positive climate-feedbacks (Helbig et al. 2020). In the northern circumpolar region, permafrost peatlands are undergoing rapid changes because of climate warming, including the formation and expansion of thermokarst lakes (Polishchuk et al. 2017). This may lead to the release of huge amounts of greenhouse gases (Joosten 2019; Serikova et al. 2019).

The emissions from peatland degradation, fires and exploitation may currently be responsible for some 5% of global anthropogenic GHG emissions (Joosten et al. 2016; Günther et al. 2020). Continuing emissions from drained peatlands until 2100 may comprise 12–41% of the remaining GHG budget for keeping global warming below + 1.5 to + 2 °C (Leifeld et al. 2019). Along with these emissions, also other ecosystem services of intact peatlands deteriorate strongly with drainage (Bonn et al. 2016).

The big bog basins

Whereas peatlands are found in almost every country of the world, one third of the global peatland area is concentrated in a few large territories: the ‘big bog basins’ (Fig. 1). These basins (which may also comprise substantial areas of ‘fen’) have long remained untouched and hardly known because of their size, remote location, and lack of access (Glaser et al. 2006). Until 1910, mainstream science even denied the existence of peatlands in the Tropics (Joosten 2016). Before World War II, only two basins had been studied comprehensively: West Siberia (Kuznetsov 1915; Baryshnikov 1929; Bronzov 1930, 1936) and Sundaland (Polak 1933). In the 1950s, the peatlands around Red Lake in northern Minnesota (Heinselman 1963) and the Hudson Bay Lowland (Sjörs 1963) became the subject of more intensive study, whereas the big basins in Africa and South-America only started to receive adequate attention in the twenty-first century (Draper et al. 2014; Dargie et al. 2017).

Fig. 1.

Fig. 1

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Global peatland distribution with the location of the ‘big bog basins’ (red circles) and the ‘principle patterned peatlands’ (stars). (1) West Siberian Plain with Great Vasugan Mire, (2) Hudson Bay Lowland (Martini, 2006), (3) Red Lake Peatlands (Glaser et al. 1981), (4) Mackenzie River Basin (Vitt et al. 2005), (5) Sundaland (Polak 1933), (6) Cuvette Centrale (Dargie et al. 2017), (7) Pastaza-Marañon (Draper et al. 2014). Map: Cosima Tegetmeyer (Greifswald Mire Centre, Global Peatland Database)

The worldwide largest peat basin is the West-Siberian Plain (Fig. 2), where peatlands cover 592 440 km2, i.e. 15% of the global peatland extent, and contain 70.21 Gt of carbon, i.e. 12% of the global peat carbon stock (Sheng et al. 2004). Whereas other inventories may report slightly different estimates (Sheng et al. 2004; Peregon et al. 2009a), these figures underline the global standing of West-Siberian peatlands. West-Siberia also shows a great diversity of mire types and surface structures. Going from north to south, we find polygon mires, palsa mires (Fig. 3), raised string bogs, pine bogs and fens, and reed and sedge fens, respectively (Botch and Masing 1983, Fig. 2). All wetlands together, i.e. peatlands, rivers and floodplains, deltas and estuaries, lakes, and other waterlogged landscapes, cover 1.8 million km2 or 70% of the West-Siberian Plain (Halicki and Kirpotin 2018). The largest and most southern of the large peatlands of West-Siberia is the Great Vasyugan Mire.

Fig. 2.

Fig. 2

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Right: peatlands (1) and shallow peatlands (2) in the Russian Federation, with the West-Siberian Plain (ellipse) and the Great Vasyugan Mire (arrow) (Reproduced with permission of the Institute of Forest Sciences, Russian Academy of Sciences). Left: distribution and zonation (after Liss et al. 2001) of peatlands in the West-Siberian Plain. I: Zone of polygon mires, II: Zone of flat-palsa mires, III: Zone of high-palsa mires, IV: Zone of raised string bogs, V: Zone of flat eutrophic and mesotrophic mires, and VI: Zone of reed and sedge fens and saltmarshes

Fig. 3.

Fig. 3

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Big mound palsa, Western Siberia (photographer: Sergey Kirpotin)

The Great Vasyugan Mire

The Great Vasyugan Mire (Fig. 4) stretches as a 10–50 km wide strip with numerous side branches from west to east over more than 600 km and from north to south over more than 450 km distance. The mire originated as 19 separate units, which during the Holocene merged to what is now the largest contiguous peatland in the world, uninterrupted by mineral islands or major rivers (Kirpotin et al. 2009). Some 25% of the current peatland area originated in the past 500 years (Inisheva et al. 2011). Its total area is 55 000 km2 (Berezin et al. 2014a) or 67 800 km2 when including paludified forests (Vaganov et al. 2008). The mire is located close to major climate boundaries and constitutes the borderline between the Southern Taiga and the Forest-Steppe biomes. The Great Vasyugan Mire forms the water divide between more than 200 tributaries of the Ob and Irtysh Rivers (Fig. 5), contains c. 800 000 small lakes and pools, holds 9.3 Gt of carbon, i.e. 1.5% of the global peat carbon stock (Vaganov et al. 2008), sequesters 3–10 Mt of CO2 and emits 1.5–5.5 Mt of oxygen and 0.1 Mt of CH4 annually (Inisheva et al. 2017; Biodiversity Conservation Research Center 2020). The mire serves as a habitat for rare species, for reproduction of key commercial species of the Taiga fauna, and as a stopover site for thousands of birds (Semenova 2014; Biodiversity Conservation Research Center 2020). It harbours large populations of globally rare and threatened plant species of paludified forests (e.g. Poa remota, Schizachne callosa, Epipogium aphyllum) and mires (e.g. Carex alba, C. meyeriana, Juncus stygius, Hammarbya paludosa, Liparis loeselii, Riccardia chamaedryfolia, Schistochylopsis laxa, Sphagnum jensenii) (Lapshina and Tanneberger 2002). Globally important is the occurrence of extensive brown moss-sedge percolation fens (Lapshina 2005), a mire type characteristic for the temperate (nemoral) zones of our planet, which worldwide has become very rare because of its suitability for agriculture (Schröder et al. 2007). Probably the most remarkable and mysterious bird species is the Slender-billed Curlew (Numenius tenuirostris), of which the only nesting worldwide was recorded from the Great Vasyugan Mire in 1909–1925 (Gretton et al. 2002).

Fig. 4.

Fig. 4

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Vasyugan Mire ground view (photographer: Alexei Kouraev)

Fig. 5.

Fig. 5

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Main peatland types of the Great Vasygan Mire with cross-section (a and b) across the Ob–Irtysh water divide (

modified from data in Berezin et al. 2014a)

Most important, but hitherto hardly recognized, is the ecosystem biodiversity (sensu art. 2 of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity), which the Great Vasyugan Mire displays. Not only does the mire complex show substantial differentiation in mire types between its north and south slope (Fig. 5), also on a somewhat finer scale its self-organizing peatland patterns are striking (Fig. 6). Similar patterns are known from the Red Lake Peatlands, and on a more limited scale from the Hudson Bay Lowland and other places in North America (Glaser et al. 1981). However, the patterning in the Vasyugan Mire is much grander, extends over a much larger area and shows so much more variety that it can rightfully be called globally unique.

Fig. 6.

Fig. 6

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Huge self-organized peatland patterns of roundish and elongated bogs, generally darker fen water tracks, and black lakes in the Great Vasyugan Mire along the Tomsk (N)–Novosibirsk (S) border. Red star: inset, see below. Source http://sasgis.ru/. Inset: oil infrastructure and vehicle tracks penetrating into the Great Vasyugan Mire in a major patterned ‘veretya’ fen water track with interspersed streamlined ‘ryam’ teardrop bog islands

Until 1970, the Great Vasyugan Mire largely remained a wilderness, with merely some hunting and gathering along river valleys. Reclamation for agriculture since the 1960s affected 110 km2 at the eastern periphery, whereas on the northeastern spurs 500 km2 were drained for forestry. The strategic status of peat in the Soviet Union led in the 1950s and 1960s to the foundation of five peatland research stations in West-Siberia, which—together with the local universities—collected over many years a wealth of data on vegetation, peat, landscape development, and hydrological functioning of the Great Vasyugan Mire and beyond (Inisheva et al. 2011).

Since 1970, oil and gas exploration and exploitation led to the construction of industrial infrastructure and facilities, destruction of ground cover by tracked vehicles, pollution, and the permanent presence of people, especially west of 81° E (Fig. 6 inset; Semenova 2005; Berezin et al. 2014b). Oil field expansion caused in 1992 the decommissioning of the 1800 km2 large Chertalinsky Beaver Reserve (‘zakaznik’), leaving three zakazniks on the territory of the Vasyugan Mire: a 650 km2 forest plantation and two zoological reserves of 850 and 1064 km2, respectively, for protecting fur-bearing mammals such as sable (Martes zibellina), otter (Lutra lutra) and beaver (Castor fiber) (Semenova 2005). In 1999, the Russian Federation submitted a Shadow List of Wetlands of International Importance to the Ramsar Convention, which included the Great Vasyugan Mire, followed in 2007 by a listing of the mire in the tentative UNESCO World Heritage List. However, definitive Ramsar or World Heritage designation has not yet followed. In 2006, 5100 km2 of the Tomsk part of the mire were given the status of ‘regional zakaznik’, and in 2017, a 6148 km2 large federal Vasyugansky Nature Reserve (‘zapovednik’) was established covering parts of the Tomsk and Novosibirsk regions.

Currently, the Great Vasyugan Mire is at a crossroad. After millennia of natural development and half a century of antagonistic economic interests, the world’s largest mire faces a new future. The traditional rationale for research, the ‘rational use’ of peat as a resource and of peatland as a platform for agriculture, forestry and hydrocarbon exploitation, is rapidly vanishing. Time has come to integrate, re-interpret and complement the available data treasure in the light of the new global challenges of conserving natural carbon sink capacity and maintaining unique biodiversity.

A forward-looking research strategy must depart from the unique selling points of the Great Vasyugan Mire: its location, its size (km2), and the extraordinary longitudinal and latitudinal range it covers.

Its location between the (Southern) Taiga and (Forest-) Steppe biomes illustrates its strategic climatic position. There are indications (Peregon et al. 2009b; Kabanov 2012) that the mire has induced regional climate change allowing it to expand southwards into the Forest-Steppe (Bronzow 1936), in a similar way as the Red Lake Peatlands in Minnesota have creeped westward across the Conifer-Hardwood forest—Prairie ecotone (Glaser et al. 1981). By its sheer size, the mire controls globally relevant carbon stocks and GHG emissions and removals, and regulates regionally important fluxes of dissolved organic matter and trace metals (Pokrovsky et al. 2016). The mire stretches over large distances in all directions, allowing mire ecosystems and biota to move with and adapt to climate change.

Over the Holocene, the mire has developed into one large, self-organizing peatland entity, which because of its coherence can be regarded as the ‘largest life form on land’, i.e. the terrestrial equivalent of the Great Barrier Reef. The mire illustrates how ecosystem biodiversity can be created, maintained and adapted by the long-term interaction of plants, peat and water (Couwenberg and Joosten 2005).

New research challenges and opportunities

In spite of this importance, the functioning of the Great Vasyugan Mire is only marginally understood. Whereas its bog and fen landforms will reflect differentiation in water re- and discharge and lateral flow (Glaser et al. 2006; Berezin et al. 2014a), it is insufficiently known why and how the various patterns originated and changed over time, as a function of climate, tectonics, soil and autogenic mire development (Inisheva et al. 2011, 2017), and how they will react in future.

Earlier studies have—for now largely obsolete exploitation purposes—gathered data on GVM with an intensity and on a scale unsurpassed by any other peatland area on Earth. Time has come to integrate these and complementary data (e.g. from state-of-the-art palaeoecological, meteorological, hydrochemical, stable isotope tracer, remote sensing and modelling studies; Peregon et al. 2009b; Elshehawi et al. 2020; Kharanzhevskaya et al. 2020) to better understand how the mire originated and developed, how the mire patterns have self-organized, and how the macro-landscape has reacted on and counteracted climate change. Of special importance is the question to what extent the mire will further fulfil its possible role of as a resilient cooler and ‘border control’ against climate change, or whether it better should be treated as a carbon bomb, waiting to be ignited.

On an even larger scale, the Great Vasyugan Mire forms a strategic corner stone in the 2500 km long, global change relevant mega-transect of research stations in diverse environments extending from the Mongolian border to the deep Arctic Yamal Peninsula (Kirpotin et al. 2018).

Concluding remarks

The unanimously decided 2015 Paris Agreement prescribes the countries of the World “to conserve and enhance sinks and reservoirs of greenhouse gases”. The UN Environment Assembly in 2019 stressed the global importance of peatlands in this respect and encouraged member states and other stakeholders to enhance regional and international collaboration, information exchange, and inter-disciplinary research to foster the conservation and sustainable management of peatlands.

Addressing these issues will require a radical change in attitude towards peatlands worldwide, including the recognition that areas not transformed by human economic activity are of strategic value to address global problems.

Its role as a stronghold against climate change and an ark for conserving biodiversity of global importance qualifies the Great Vasyugan Mire to be safeguarded in its integrity and to be designated as a UNESCO World Natural Heritage Site and a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance, as a matter of regional and national pride and as a sign of global responsibility. The Great Vasyugan Mire is one of the fascinating places in the world that we cannot afford to lose: for its beauty, and for the “ecological security” it offers (Liss et al. 2001).

Acknowledgements

SK and AP are grateful for support to the Russian Science Foundation 20-67-46018. AB is grateful for support to the State assignment of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation (Project No. 0721-2020-0019). SK is also grateful for support of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research in the Framework of Scientific Projects No. 18-05-60264. The reported study was partly funded by the and by RFBR and Government of the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Area—Yugra according to the Research Project No. 18-44-860017. EL was supported by the grant of the Tyumen region Government in accordance with the Program of the World-Class West Siberian Interregional Scientific and Educational Center (National Project "Nauka”). AF acknowledges support from the German Research Foundation (grant no. FE-1096/6-1). Finally, we thank the TA INTERACT Programme and support of SecNet.

Biographies

Sergey N. Kirpotin

is a Professor, Leading Researcher at Tuva State University and Director of the “Bio-Clim-Land” Center of Excellence at Tomsk State University. His research interests include landscape ecology, Arctic studies, geocryology, remote sensing, plant ecology and biogeochemistry.

Olga A. Antoshkina

is Director of Federal Nature Reserve Vasyugansky. Her research interests include environmental management, protected areas studies.

Alexander E. Berezin

is a Head of the Nature Protection Laboratory, Scientific Research Institute of Biology and Biophysics, at Tomsk State University. His research interests include environmental management, mire studies, GIS, landscape studies.

Samer Elshehawi

is a Researcher at DUENE (partner in the Greifswald Mire). His research interests include environmental science, ecohydrology and isotope hydrology.

Angelica Feurdean

is Researcher at the Institute of Physical Geography, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Her research interests include spatial dynamics of vegetation, climate, fire regime, and peatland development and carbon accumulation using fossil records.

Elena D. Lapshina

is Professor, Director of Research Education Centre “Environmental Dynamics and Global Climate Change” (UNESCO Chair). Her research interests include peatland studies, biodiversity studies, bryophytes, landscape structure and development dynamics of peat bogs in Western Siberia in connection with the peculiarities of environmental conditions and climate changes in the Holocene, remote methods for analysing the spatial structure and state of natural landscapes.

Oleg S. Pokrovsky

is Research Director of at the Geosciences and Environment Laboratory, CNRS, Toulouse, France. His research interests include biogeochemistry, Arctic studies, and biogeochemistry of organic matter.

Anna M. Peregon

is PhD in biology (Soil Science), Leading Researcher at Tuva State University and Senior Researcher in the Institute of Soil Science and Agrochemistry, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ISSA SB RAS). Her research interests include climate change in the Northern Eurasia, remote sensing applications for land cover/land use change analysis, biogeochemistry and carbon cycle in terrestrial ecosystems: regional, national and global assessments.

Natalia M. Semenova

is Associated Professor of Nature Management, Geology and Geography Faculty at Tomsk State University. Her research interests include environmental management, protected areas studies, landscape studies.

Franziska Tanneberger

is Researcher at the Institute of Botany and Landscape Ecology at Greifswald University and Director of the Greifswald Mire Centre, Germany. Her research interests include fen mire ecology and biodiversity, restoration and paludiculture.

Igor V. Volkov

is an Associate Professor of the Department of General Biology and Methods of Teaching Biology at Tomsk State Pedagogical University. His research interests include plant ecology, adaptations to extreme environments, geobotany, landscape ecology, nature wise use and conservation.

Irina I. Volkova

is Associate Professor of the Department of Botany and Coordinator of Wetland Centre at Tomsk State University. Her research interests include mire science, geobotany, bryology, landscape ecology, nature wise use and conservation.

Hans Joosten

is Professor of Peatland Studies and Palaeoecology and Secretary-General of the International Mire Conservation Group. He is interested in all aspects of peatlands, in all regions and over all times.

Footnotes

Publisher's Note

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Contributor Information

Sergey N. Kirpotin, Email: kirp@mail.tsu.ru

Olga A. Antoshkina, Email: antoshkina@green.tsu.ru

Alexandr E. Berezin, Email: aber@res.tsu.ru

Samer Elshehawi, Email: s.elshehawi@duene-greifswald.de.

Angelica Feurdean, Email: feurdean@em.uni-frankfurt.de.

Elena D. Lapshina, Email: e_lapshina@ugrasu.ru

Oleg S. Pokrovsky, Email: Oleg.Pokrovski@get.omp.Eu

Anna M. Peregon, Email: anya.peregon@gmail.com

Natalia M. Semenova, Email: nmsemnv@mail.tomsknet.ru

Franziska Tanneberger, Email: tanne@uni-greifswald.de.

Igor V. Volkov, Email: volkovhome2016@gmail.com

Irina I. Volkova, Email: volkovhome@yandex.ru

Hans Joosten, Email: joosten@uni-greifswald.de.

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