The process of peatland and wetland restoration takes time and effort both in the biophysical and social domain. Within MERLIN we work on upscaling restoration efforts for these valuable ecosystems. Therefore a field visit was organized in April 2023 to three locations near Edinburgh, Scotland where peatland restoration is being carried out and monitored in detailed manner. We were able to share experiences with between seven peatland and wetland restoration case studies within the project coming from Portugal, Poland, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Bosnia and the UK.

Despite every case study being unique there are also a lot of common topics, such as how to best monitor green house gas emissions and biodiversity values, and how to guarantee long term monitoring to really start seeing the impacts of the restoration measures. Also, the inclusion of stakeholders and role of private financing is a topic of common interest. We discussed the need of presenting ecosystem restoration as a Nature-based Solution to better link not only to a net-biodiversity gain, but also make more explicit to stakeholder the benefit this restoration may bring them directly in terms of improved ecosystem services.

Big thanks to Amy Pickard and the full CEH team for the excellent organization and to Niall Provan from the Forth Rivers Trust, and Iain Sime from Nature Scot showing us around the sites.