Resilience of peatland ecosystem services over millennial timescales: evidence from a degraded British bog

1. Many peatland ecosystems in Europe have become degraded in the last century owing to the effects of drainage, burning, pollution, and climate change. There is a need to understand the drivers of peatland degradation because management and restoration interventions can affect the natural ecohydrological dynamics of such sensitive environments, and are expensive. However, if given enough time peatlands may have the ability to recover spontaneously without deliberate action. 2. We use a detailed multiproxy palaeoecological dataset from a degraded raised bog in Northern England to examine its ecosystem stability and long-term dynamics in response to anthropogenic disturbance over a variety of timescales. One feature of many degraded peatlands (including our study site) is the local dominance of Molinia caerulea (purple moor-grass), which has expanded at the expense of characteristic peatland plants, including sedges and Sphagnum mosses. 3. Our data show that there has been a long history...