peatland

noun

peat·​land ˈpēt-ˌland 

plural peatlands

: land rich in peat (see peat entry 1 sense 1a)

For hundreds of years, dark brown peat from some of the most unspoiled peatlands in Scotland has provided the people … with their annual supply of fuel for heating and cooking.

—Alan Simpson

Peatlands have also come into sharp focus over the past 20 years because they are the largest and most concentrated global store of carbon of all terrestrial ecosystems, containing twice the carbon of the forest biomass.

—Anja Murray

Estates in the Highlands are often not fertile enough for profitable farming and the properties are large, making it easier to do tree-planting or peatland restoration that sequesters carbon at scale.

—The Economist

Examples of peatland in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

However this type of action has no direct effects on increasing the country’s carbon sink for which logging and peatland degradation reduced the possibility for trees and peat so absorb carbon. —Daniela De Lorenzo, Forbes, 21 Oct. 2024

Rocha explains that studying peatlands is fundamental to understanding their potential for climate change mitigation, especially in the Global South: for example, large cities such as Quito, Ecuador and Bogota, Colombia depend directly on these ecosystems for their water supply. —Andrew Wight, Forbes, 15 Oct. 2024

The finding had huge implications for the protection of the DRC’s tropical peatlands, which span 145,500 square kilometers, and sparked a campaign to stop the Congolese government from opening up the jungle to oil drilling. —Byemmet Livingstone, science.org, 3 Oct. 2024

All told, bogs and other peatlands occupy around 3% of Earth’s land. —Quanta Magazine, 28 May 2024

To stop the bleeding, advocates have proposed paying countries to preserve undisturbed peatlands. —Quanta Magazine, 28 May 2024

Word History

First Known Use

circa 1560, in the meaning defined above