When a campfire in 2018 started a wildfire that raged across 61 hectares of moorland near the Staffordshire town of Leek, 20% of the precious peatland landscape of the Roaches was devastated. The equivalent of over 85 football pitches of ground was left lifeless and blackened.
Moors for the Future Partnership scientific research of the aftermath revealed a 53mm depth of peat was lost to the fire. That peat would have taken over 50 years to form from vegetation being preserved in waterlogged, acidic conditions of blanket bog. Over 11,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide was released back into the atmosphere as a direct result of the fire, the equivalent carbon loss to running 1,426 homes for a year.
Moors for the Future Partnership has begun extensive works on this scarred landscape. These works include the blocking of gullies eroded by water using stone and coir log dams made from coconut fibre, the re-wetting of the degrading and drying peat surface using sphagnum moss planting, diversifying the vegetation and planting of a selection of native plants and the stabilising and revegetating of remaining bare peat from the 2018 fire.
Restoration work like this is really important as it’ll help inform wider climate based restoration work as well.