Digitized inventory of the French peatlands of 1949

Digitized data from the French peatland inventory ("Les tourbières françaises", Ministry of Industry and Trade, 1949). This national inventory was carried out in order to estimate the stock of peat in metropolitan France and to facilitate its exploitation, essentially for fuel purposes. Thus, a peatland prospecting campaign was carried out from 1941 to 1945. Some former regions could not be entirely prospected because of the historical context, notably Alsace and Nord Pas-de-Calais.
As the original document was only available in paper format, it was scanned and georeferenced by the Pôle Relais Tourbières and the Chrono-Environnement laboratory. The atlas contains a cartography of the peaty sites prospected with the 1:80 000 scale staff map as a background. Each peaty site is assigned a code referring to the data sheets, where the name of the peat bog and the commune(s) on which it is located are given. The surface area, peat thickness and volume data are accompanied by other data such as ash content and discovery, as well as a commentary providing details on each site.