From the archive
9 Sep 2026
The ditch is the problem. More than half of Finland's peatlands have historically been drained, cut through with channels that let the water out and left the peat to dry. At Isosuo, a raised bog in the municipality of Hartola in the Päijät-Häme region, the repair work is the exact reverse of the damage: find the ditches, and stop them up.
The work is led by PLUPS, a Finnish foundation whose name translates as the Foundation for Better Nature. Since 2024 its crews and volunteers have been blocking drainage channels with leaky dams and raising water levels with small earthworks, so that typical bog vegetation can return. The restoration area runs to between 180 and 300 hectares, and the foundation has been securing and legally protecting adjoining parcels so the rewetted ground joins up rather than sitting as islands.
The reason for bothering is the arithmetic. Peat covers about 3 per cent of the Earth's surface and holds more than 30 per cent of its soil carbon, over twice what all the world's forests contain. Drained, it oxidises and the store becomes a source. Rewetted, the bog goes back to holding water through floods and droughts, filtering what runs off it, and housing the waders, grouse and invertebrates that made Isosuo the region's most important peatland for birds. Camera traps are already watching.
What happens next is slower. PLUPS is considering low-intensity grazing with local cattle to keep meadow and mire open, and birdwatching and guided visits as ways the bog might pay its keep. Local volunteers built some of the dams with their own hands, which may matter as much as the hydrology: a bog repaired by its neighbours is less likely to be drained again.
A drained peatland is rewetted with a spade more often than a machine. Pull the old ditch lines off aerial photos or drainage maps, then dam them at close intervals with packed peat or rough timber, so water leaks through slowly rather than washing the dam out. The tools are cheap and the technique forgives amateurs; the cost is in the walking and the waiting.
Rewilding Europe · Read the source