A new edition of Conserving Bogs: The Management Handbook is now available.
Conserving Bogs: The Management Handbook is a practical manual: a cookbook of methods and techniques to help people effectively manage and conserve bogs. This new edition has been updated to reflect advances and evolution in both understanding and techniques.
In his foreword to the book, Dr. Tony Juniper, CBE, says:
“The good news is that not only can intact peatlands be conserved but damaged ones be restored, in the process realising many benefits. In the pages that follow readers can find out about the ways in which it is possible to place peatlands on the road to recovery, reversing the effects of centuries of ignorance as to their true value.”
Conserving Bogs was part of a process aimed at refining peatland conservation management. In Britain, Rowell’s extremely useful Peatland Management Handbook laid the framework for a more professional approach to the subject. Projects such as English Nature’s Lowland Peatland Project and Scottish Wildlife Trust’s Raised Bog Conservation Project shared information around the bog management community. The alliance of practical experience with academic research brought bog conservation to a threshold where conservation activities could move from crisis management to reversing the progressive degradation of our peatlands.
Today, this collaborative approach to peatland restoration in the UK remains through the collective IUCN UK Peatland Programme, which brings together practitioners, scientists and policy makers. In the past twenty years, much restoration work has been undertaken and lessons have been learned about many of the techniques described in Conserving Bogs. While many of the techniques outlined in the first edition of Conserving Bogs are still widely used today, newer techniques, technology, mapping systems and approaches to project management have been developed, particularly in dealing with the large-scale restoration needed in the uplands.
The Yorkshire Peat Partnership (managed by Yorkshire Wildlife Trust) with support from the IUCN UK Peatland Programme has carried out an interim update of Conserving Bogs to produce this substantially revised online second edition.
