SMOKE ON WATER

the related land use, land use change and forestry discussions. Despite rapidly developing remote sensing technology, accurate peatland mapping still faces a number of issues. There is also a need to collate reliable geo-referenced peatland soil profiles to provide the sufficient ground data for calibration and validation of remote sensing-based mapping and modelling approaches. Making more high resolution satellite imagery freely available will help meet these challenges. Opportunities also exist to integrate fragmented legacy data and maps of peatland occurrences to prepare ‘peatland probability maps’ as starting points for national peatland inventories (Barthelmes et al., 2016). Awareness raising and knowledge exchange will be useful in encouraging more countries to produce a national inventory. At the same time techniques to foster innovation, such as the ‘Indonesian Peat Prize’ contest, could lead to new and improved peatland mapping technologies and methodologies. Research needs While it is possible to achieve progress in peatland conservation now, this report has highlighted a number of research gaps that need to be filled to accelerate this. These

Many coastal peatlands in tropical Asia have been deforested and drained for decades and await further identification and mapping (e.g. Bangladesh, Myanmar, Vietnam and Cambodia). The actual extent of peatlands and organic soils in Papua New Guinea (which has the seventh largest peatland area in the world) is also unclear. In addition, a major mapping challenge will be the numerous smaller peatlands that are spread along coastal areas, river floodplains and lake shores in the tropics, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa. In the countries that make up the European Union, the picture is different. Contemporary peat resources have been estimated using data provided by the European Soil Information System managed by the Joint Research Centre (JRC). The data are collected by participating countries and harmonized within the European Soil Data Centre hosted by the JRC (Montanarella et al., 2006). A detailed map of peatlands in Europe was recently published by Tannerberger et al. (2017). Satellite imagery has recently grown in importance due to the increased interest in peatlands and organic soils in the framework of the international climate change negotiations and

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