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05/09/2023 On September 8, 2023, a rewetted peatland area and paludiculture can be experienced at the Great Mire Excursion Day on a 10 ha cultivation area for cattail from 11 am - 5 pm.

For peat must be wet, but how and how much? And what comes after that? These are the questions addressed by the joint projects Paludi-PROGRESS, MoKKa, PRINCESS and other peatland and paludiculture projects at the Greifswald Mire Centre, together with various partners. At different stops of our walking tour, we will provide information about our work and you can ask your questions about the following topics, engaging in an exchange with scientists:

• Peatlands, their climate impact and the concept of paludiculture
• Cultivation, biomass quality and economic aspects of reed and cattail cultures
• Biodiversity, peat condition and greenhouse gas measurements in cattail cultivation
• Water and nutrient balance in cattail cultivation
• Drones, measurement technology and wireless sensors
• Utilization of paludiculture biomass

You will be able to observe how greenhouse gas emissions are measured, to travel back in time through the layers of a peat profile, test how it feels to live in a tiny house made of paludiculture materials and, of course, admire the picturesque moor landscape.

Registration for groups of 5 people or more: josephine.neubert@uni-greifswald.de.
Catering: Food will be provided (against payment).
Recommendation: We advise sturdy shoes and weatherproof clothing.
Directions and map of the area (in German): Access to the polder Teichweide from halfway between Neukalen and Lelkendorf, close to the former railway station Lelkendorf. It is possible to park there. The walking distance from the parking lot to the test area is about 1.2 km.

The Excursion Day will be held with the participation of the State Research Institute for Agriculture and Fisheries Mecklenburg Western Pomerania, the Voigt Farm and the Baltic Sea Foundation.

23/08/2023 In the UN Decade Project of the Year 2023 competition, there are three projects with GMC participation in the top 10 - a recognition of the importance of peatlands in the climate and biodiversity crisis, but also of the efforts to protect and preserve them.

toMOORow, the initiative with a forward-looking name from the Michael Otto Environmental Foundation and the Succow Foundation, partner in the Greifswald Mire Centre, is committed to wet bogs and sustainable management on peatlands. Its aim is to use the diverse peatland properties for climate and biodiversity protection and also for the economy. In practical terms, it waters areas in Brandenburg, activates companies to utilize paludi biomass and is committed to the necessary political framework. The Karrendorfer Wiesen, an area owned by the Succow Foundation, received one of the ten places as an example of successful restoration. The coastal flood peatland offers 350 hectares of rare salt grassland, where natural coastal and flood dynamics prevail and rare animal and plant species occur, especially limicols and other water birds, while at the same time carbon is stored in the peat.

MoorFutures is also in the top 10. It refers to innovative certificates for the restoration of peatlands. One MoorFutures represents one ton of avoided carbon dioxide from peatlands, and private individuals and companies can use it to actively make a contribution to combating the climate crisis. They were developed in cooperation with scientists from the GMC and the Ministry of the Environment of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The United Nations has declared the years 2021 to 2030 as the UN Decade for the Restoration of Ecosystems. They assume that the next ten years will be crucial in the fight against climate change and global species extinction. Restoring damaged ecosystems is central to this. That's why the United Nations wants to use this UN Decade to mobilize people around the world to recognize the benefits of ecosystems and work to restore them. They also want to create the necessary political will to restore ecosystems. In Germany, the Federal Environment Ministry (BMUV) and the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation (BfN) honor current, representative projects for the restoration, preservation or maintenance of ecosystems. The projects mentioned are among the top 10 in the “Mires and Wetlands” competition round.

Wikipedians visit GMC

20/06/2023 On a three-day NaTour from June 9th to 11th, visitors from the Wikipedia universe came to the Greifswald Mire Centre (GMC). The common idea: exchange knowledge and offer and develop more content about peatlands with articles, images or data on the various platforms around Wikipedia. On the one hand, this strengthens the ecology contributions on Wikipedia and, on the other hand, makes knowledge about peatlands and their importance for climate protection available to more people.

There were four free and public workshops on Friday: firstly, know-how from the Wikipedians for those interested - from an introduction to the Wiki world to instructions for writing articles, uploading images to Wikimedia Commons and getting to know Wikidata. In the evening, Franziska Tanneberger, director of the Greifswald Mire Center, presented this in more detail for the Wikipedians in an hour.

Saturday and Sunday were full of moorland know-how for the five visitors. The start was on the restored Karrendorfer Wiesen coastal floodplain, which is partly a nature reserve. Grazing and seasonal flooding have formed an anthropozoogenic salt grassland here, a type of peatland that today only occurs in a few places on the Lagoon coast in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. In the afternoon we continued to a test area for cattail cultivation on Lake Kummerow. Here, the PaludiPROGRESS project at the University of Greifswald is researching how cattail species can be grown in paludiculture as economic crops and raw material suppliers, for example for insulation and building materials or packaging materials. The area offered an open-air lecture on measuring greenhouse gas emissions using hoods or Eddy-Covariance-towers.

A dense program on Sunday: How plant growth and water levels are related and analyzed with regard to emissions from soils could be found out at the fully automated mesocosm facility at the Institute of Botany and Landscape Ecology (LaÖk) at the University of Greifswald. “Moor Pope” Hans Joosten welcomed the Wikipedians in the Program Library for Peatlands and Nature Conservation (PeNCIL). With more than 25,000 publications, this library offers some GLAM potential on the peatland topic. The Wikipedians found out how much the ongoing drought can threaten current research in the peat moss laboratory of the LaÖk Institute, where a dozen species of peat moss are bred and examined. After more than two months without precipitation, the rain barrels for irrigation water were almost empty. If the drought continues, we will have to make our own rainwater, say the scientists. In this context, cultural traditions such as rain songs were also remembered. The intensive weekend made it clear: the visit was just a prelude. In addition to the Wiki entries and images that were edited during the visit (see documentation), the next step will be an online lecture by Wikipedia colleague Daniel Mietchen at the GMC. This highlights further possibilities for more freely available moor knowledge in the Wikiverse.