Mapping Peatlands in Ireland using a Rule‐Based Methodology and Digital Data

Peatlands have been recognized as being an important global C pool and make significant contributions to national C fluxes. In Ireland, they cover a considerable amount of the national land area, but no recent inventory or mapping has been undertaken to quantify the spatial extent of this important resource. This study used a rule-based methodology implemented as a series of hierarchical rules in ArcGIS to estimate the extent of contemporary peatlands in Ireland from soil and land-cover maps dating from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. The Derived Irish Peat Map was produced at a pixel resolution of 100 m and shows Ireland's peatland resource to be 0.95 Mha or 13.8% of the national land area. This is comparable to estimates of 13.2% from CORINE land-cover data (1990s), 17.0% from the Peatland Map of Ireland (1970s), and 16.7% from the General Soil Map (1980s). The derived map depicts the spatial extent of three peatland types: raised bog and low- and high-level blanket bog. Ground truthing of the derived map enabled estimates of pixel reliability to be calculated. The derived map has an overall reliability of 75% compared with the reliability of 65% for CORINE, 58% for the Peatland Map of Ireland, and 50% for the General Soil Map. We concluded that the methodology created a value-added soil map product from a number of data sources, all of which were to some degree imperfect. The approach taken could be applied to similar survey problems not related to peatlands.

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