Bog
A bog usually is found at a freshwater soft spongy ground that is made up of decayed plant matter which is known as peat.
[1][8] Bogs have distinctive assemblages of animal, fungal, and plant species, and are of high importance for biodiversity, particularly in landscapes that are otherwise settled and farmed.
The world's largest wetland is the peat bogs of the Western Siberian Lowlands in Russia, which cover more than a million square kilometres.
[9] Large peat bogs also occur in North America, particularly the Hudson Bay Lowland and the Mackenzie River Basin.
A paper led by Graeme T. Swindles in 2019 showed that peatlands across Europe have undergone rapid drying in recent centuries owing to human impacts including drainage, peat cutting and burning.
They can provide habitat for mammals, such as caribou, moose, and beavers, as well as for species of nesting shorebirds, such as Siberian cranes and yellowlegs.
[22] The highest protected status occurs in Zapovedniks (IUCN category IV); Gydansky[23] and Yugansky are two prominent examples.
[citation needed] Bogs are fragile ecosystems, and have been deteriorating quickly, as archaeologists and scientists have been recently finding.
[24] This has been found to be from fluctuations in ground water and increase in acidity[25] in lower areas of bogs that is affecting the rich organic material.
There have been some temporary solutions to try and fix these issues, such as adding soil to the tops of threatened areas, yet they do not work in the long-term.
Since bogs take thousands of years to form and create the rich peat that is used as a resource, once they are gone they are extremely hard to recover.
Arctic and sub-Arctic circles where many bogs are warming at 0.6 °C per decade, an amount twice as large as the global average.
Valley bogs may develop in relatively dry and warm climates, but because they rely on ground or surface water, they only occur on acidic substrates.
This part, therefore, becomes wholly rain-fed (ombrotrophic), and the resulting acidic conditions allow the development of bog (even if the substrate is non-acidic).
In Europe, these mostly very thin peat layers without significant surface structures are distributed over the hills and valleys of Ireland, Scotland, England, and Norway.
The bog vegetation, mostly sphagnum moss anchored by sedges (such as Carex lasiocarpa), forms a floating mat approximately half a meter thick on the surface of water or above very wet peat.
The bog mat may eventually spread across the water surface to cover bays or even entire small lakes.
[30] A cataract bog is a rare ecological community formed where a permanent stream flows over a granite outcropping.
The sheeting of water keeps the edges of the rock wet without eroding the soil, but in this precarious location, no tree or large shrub can maintain a roothold.
Some distilleries, notably in the Islay whisky-producing region, use the smoke from peat fires to dry the barley used in making Scotch whisky.
[citation needed][39] The anaerobic environment and presence of tannic acids within bogs can result in the remarkable preservation of organic material.
They have yielded extremely well-preserved bog bodies, with hair, organs, and skin intact, buried there thousands of years ago after apparent Germanic and Celtic human sacrifice.
These anaerobic conditions lead to some of the best-preserved mummies and offer much archeological insight into society as far as 8,000 years back.
