News

Kicking off WETSCAPES 2.0

with people on a 2-day event

01/04/2025  WETSCAPES 2.0, a large, interdisciplinary science consortium dedicated to researching rewetted fens started today with a 2-day meeting at Rostock University of more than 50 scientists from diverse fields, including 22 Principal Investigators (PIs) leading various subprojects, along with many Early Career Researchers (ECR).
Their diversity highlighted just how complex and ambitious this research programme funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft is, aiming to investigate approximately 100 screening sites, 5 core sites, and two landscape-level experiments in rewetted peatlands of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. This federal state has rewetted already more than 10% of its peatland area and is frontrunning in developing solutions for wet peatland use (paludiculture, carbon credits, nature tourism, peatland photovoltaics). Now, the CRC will add a massive effort in fundamental research in rewetted fens.
The kick-off included a trip to one of the planned screening sites, where installed the first of our 1,000 sensors used for the project’s data collection! For some of us, it was the first visit of a North-German fen. They are almost everywhere and look often like 'normal' grassland!
Besides the funding of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - German Research Foundation, the Transregio Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) 410 is additionally supported by Universität Greifswald Universität Rostock, Leibniz Institut für Gewässerökologie und Binnenfischerei (IGB), Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, GFZ Helmholtz-Zentrum für Geoforschung  and the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.