Set in Scotland, this film follows the case for restoring degraded peatlands, which store a significant amount of carbon but require better monitoring. Speakers describe how Spire’s satellite and remote-sensing work, including soil-moisture measurement, can help prioritize restoration and measure its effectiveness over time.
Stills
Transcript Auto-generated from Vimeo
Here in Scotland, we’ve probably had peatlands since the last ice age of 10,000 years ago. So peatlands are a very important resource here in Scotland, particularly when thinking of climate change.
It’s been calculated that the amount of carbon stored in Scotland’s peatlands is equivalent to about 140 or 150 years of our annual carbon emissions. Unfortunately, about 80% of those peatlands are degraded in some sort of shape or form, so they’re actually actively emitting carbon.
We have to restore a lot more peatlands here in Scotland in order to have any chance of getting to the net-zero target. If we’re going to the bother of restoring peatlands, and we’ve got a lot to restore, we need to ensure they’re being effective. We need to monitor the restoration process. In fact, we need to prioritize where we restore first of all, and then we need to know whether that is being effective or not.
We’re not able to do that solely through humans regularly enough to get the breadth of data that we need. That’s where satellite technology and remote sensing have a big role to play in helping decision-making about peatland restoration here in Scotland and elsewhere in the world.
Spire currently has over a hundred satellites in orbit. The reason we have so many satellites is because we want to monitor the Earth in a near-real-time fashion: not just once a day or twice a day, but continuously. That continuous feed of information allows us to make decisions and policy corrections as our understanding moves forward.
An example of a program we performed with the UK Space Agency and the European Space Agency was the development of a nanosatellite-based soil-moisture monitoring product. You’re looking at how the reflectivity of soil changes as a function of how wet it is.
The way that we measure soil moisture is fairly interesting. We use GPS satellites as a radar. We look at how a GPS signal coming off a satellite reflects off the soil. That signal goes through canopy and plants on the ground, and it reflects more if the soil is wetter than if it is drier. By flying over and looking at how those signals reflect, we can get a global map of soil moisture, whether or not there is forest or plants.
We have big aspirations to restore the amount of degraded peatland that we have. If we can restore it effectively and it is functioning properly, then we will bring more life back into what some people might think is quite a denuded landscape.
