Erin Glen
Erin Glen is a GIS Research Associate with Land & Carbon Lab at the World Resources Institute, where she develops and applies geospatial data, remote sensing, and spatial analysis to support forest carbon monitoring, land use, and natural climate solutions. Her work focuses on improving monitoring and decision-support tools for land managers and advancing global analyses of land sector greenhouse gas emissions.
Sessions
Peatlands and other organic soils occupy a small fraction of the land surface but store a large share of the global soil carbon. Drainage and fire in these systems are major sources of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, yet remain poorly mapped. Remote sensing enables global monitoring of proxies for peatland disturbance, but no monitoring system currently links the extent of organic soils, disturbance, and emissions at high spatial resolution. Here we develop a 0.00025° (approximately 30 m) global geospatial framework that overlays organic soils extent with multi-temporal land cover and land use data, drainage infrastructure, plantations, peat extraction areas, coastal wetlands, and burned area to delineate disturbed organic soils. Using IPCC Wetlands Supplement default (Tier 1) methods, we estimate CO2, CH4, N2O, and CO emissions for disturbed organic soils over 2001–2024. Baseline results indicate that disturbed organic soils emitted about 4.9 Gt CO2e yr-1 (4.5–5.1 Gt CO2e yr-1 across five inventory periods), with roughly three quarters from drainage and one quarter from fires. Emissions and disturbed area are heavily concentrated in a small group of countries and land uses, dominated by Russia and Indonesia, particularly cropland and settlements in boreal and temperate zones and plantations on organic soils in the tropics. Sensitivity experiments that vary the extent of organic soils, the drainage radius around infrastructure, and IPCC default (Tier 1) emission factors yield a plausible range of approximately 3–7 Gt CO2e yr-1. These estimates should not be interpreted as a correction to existing peatland-specific emission estimates, but as complementary, more comprehensive monitoring of disturbed organic soil systems under a harmonized, globally consistent framework. The resulting 30 m global maps of organic soil state, disturbance, and emissions demonstrate how multi-temporal Earth observation can be combined with GHG inventory methods to monitor peatland disturbance drivers, identify high-emitting hotspots, and provide an updatable resource for inventories, nationally determined contributions, and peatland conservation and restoration planning.