'Rare moss species are fighting climate change'

Extinct moss is being reintroduced across Yorkshire's moors in the fight against climate change.

Sphagnum moss can hold 20 times its weight in water and helps create peat bogs, where dead vegetation accumulates rather than decays, capturing carbon in the ground.

Two projects – one in the Yorkshire Dales and another on Marsden Moor near Huddersfield – are reintroducing mosses to the uplands, which it is hoped will also create diverse habitats for wildlife.

At Kingsdale Head Farm in Ingleton, experts from the Yorkshire Peat Partnership are planting a rare sphagnum austinii that has been extinct in Yorkshire for hundreds of years.

Data and evidence manager Beth Thomas says the austinii disappeared from the Dales because of drainage and industrial activity.

"Austinii is a real peat forming species. When you look through the peat cores that exist in this landscape for about the last 6,000 years, the peat formed after the last ice age, you can see that austinii is the real dominant sphagnum here," she says.

"It's been extinct in Yorkshire for hundreds of years and we're looking to reintroduce it to these peat lands so that we can reintroduce that function and formation of the peat habitat.

"It is so important for carbon storage, for flood mitigation, for cleaning our water but also for our wildlife and the people who use these places and want to enjoy the wildness of them."

The sphagnum austinii has been brought from Scotland, where it still grows, to the Yorkshire Dales and is being propagated in local nurseries before it is planted within the blanket bogs.

It is then positioned and logged using GPS trackers so it can be monitored.

At Kingsdale Head, two thirds of the 610-hectare site is blanket bog and farm manager Jamie McEwan says they are beginning to see "really nice results" from the restoration.

"Huge landscapes and huge parts of the landscape are made up of blanket bogs and peat lands but a lot of the interest happens at this tiny little scale," he says.

"Whether I'm there to see the full results of what we're doing today or not I don't know, but we'll certainly find out more about it."

Sphagnum moss had not disappeared from Marsden Moor, between the industrial heartlands of Huddersfield and Manchester, but it had been badly affected by centuries of industrial pollution.

Now managed by the National Trust, rangers have been working to re-wet the moor for the past 20 years, and it is a site of special scientific interest (SSSI) and a special area of conservation.

Area ranger Ian Downson is inviting the public to the National Trust moss nursery to learn about sphagnum's special properties.

"Sphagnum moss gets all its nutrients from the air, from the water. And what happens is if that is poisonous - a lot of sulphur and lead from industrial pollution - that then settles on the moss and it doesn't like that.

"So historically we've lost a good portion, if not most of the species that were up there," he says.

Over the past decade hundreds of thousands of sphagnum "moss plugs" have been planted on the moor, helping to capture more than 1 million tonnes of carbon, he says, equivalent to about 150,000 round-trip flights from London to Sydney.

"The peatlands form roughly about a millimetre per year. So it's growing all the time, it's laying down that peat as the sphagnum is kind of decaying.

"In that peat formation, you're drawing down and you're storing carbon, you're storing CO2, which is the main thing in terms of climate resilience."

The moss also creates habitats for rare species, such as the curlew, and is a vital tool in the fight against wildfires.

"If a fire hits a blanket bog, it doesn't burn. If you've got lots of sphagnum up there, if your bog's made up of 80-90% sphagnum, then when a fire gets there it's pretty much going to stop it," says Downson.

According to the National Trust, healthy peat can store between 30kg and 70kg of carbon per cubic metre - and that is key for our future, says Thomas.

"We're not trying to bring the moors back to what they were 1,000 years ago. We're looking forward to a future of climate change," she says.

"We want to try to produce the diversity of plant life there because the more diversity we have, the more resilient they're going to be through climate change and if we can bring back these species that have been lost we can see if we will get resilient habitats that will survive the next 100, 1,000 or millennia in these places."

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