Greenhouse gas Emission Monitoring with Innovative aNd low-cost Instruments (GEMINI)

The restoration of vast tracts of peatlands is a key UK government strategy aiming to help achieve net zero by 2050 and tackle climate change. Peatlands are important global carbon (C) stores accumulating around 30% of the world's soil C in only 3% of its land surface. The UK contains substantial peatland ecosystems, covering more than 12% of the total land area, of which less than a quarter are in near-natural condition. Natural intact peatlands can act as a significant net sink of greenhouse gases (GHGs), removing carbon dioxide (CO2) from our atmosphere and storing it longer term in bog and fen wetlands. Unfortunately, UK peatlands overall represent a significant net source of GHGs to the atmosphere, with 60% of emissions originating from lowland peats drained for agriculture. Widespread peat management and restoration projects, such as rewetting drained, or 'wasted' peatland areas, could therefore aid in mitigating climate change by reducing emissions, as well as by providing wider societal benefits such as promoting biodiversity, minimising flood risks, and helping to provide safe drinking waters.

Measuring the effectiveness of landscape peatland recovery efforts is however extremely challenging. Regular measurements of GHG emissions (hourly/ daily) currently require sophisticated and expensive tower infrastructure, limiting the number we can deploy, and the area directly measured to monitor changes in GHGs our landscapes are releasing. We, therefore, require new innovative and low-cost solutions for environmental GHG monitoring instrumentation. The GEMINI project will address these challenges by developing robust, low-cost, and open-access GHG sensor platforms, capable of monitoring CO2 and methane (CH4) emissions from our landscapes and providing information suitable for supplementing current UK observational networks. These sensor systems will have low power requirements making them capable of working remotely, unsupervised for months without mains power. Individual sensors will be capable of measuring regularly (every 30 minutes) and sending their results directly to a shared network.