Hydroclimatic vulnerability of peat carbon in the central Congo Basin

The forested swamps of the central Congo Basin store approximately 30 billion metric tonnes of carbon in peat1,2. Little is known about the vulnerability of these carbon stocks. Here we investigate this vulnerability using peat cores from a large interfluvial basin in the Republic of the Congo and palaeoenvironmental methods. We find that peat accumulation began at least at 17,500 calibrated years before present (cal. yr bp; taken as ad 1950). Our data show that the peat that accumulated between around 7,500 to around 2,000 cal. yr bp is much more decomposed compared with older and younger peat. Hydrogen isotopes of plant waxes indicate a drying trend, starting at approximately 5,000 cal. yr bp and culminating at approximately 2,000 cal. yr bp, coeval with a decline in dominant swamp forest taxa. The data imply that the drying climate probably resulted in a regional drop in the water table, which triggered peat decomposition, including the loss of peat carbon accumulated prior to the onset of the drier conditions. After approximately 2,000 cal. yr bp, our data show that the drying trend ceased, hydrologic conditions stabilized and peat accumulation resumed. This reversible accumulation–loss–accumulation pattern is consistent with other peat cores across the region, indicating that the carbon stocks of the central Congo peatlands may lie close to a climatically driven drought threshold. Further research should quantify the combination of peatland threshold behaviour and droughts driven by anthropogenic carbon emissions that may trigger this positive carbon cycle feedback in the Earth system

Publisher Correction: Hydroclimatic vulnerability of peat carbon in the central Congo Basin

International audienc

Hydroclimatic vulnerability of peat carbon in the central Congo Basin: codes for age-depth models, geospatial data processing and analysis

This dataset includes two packages: Age_depth_models and Tropical_Peats for the creation of the age-depth models and the processing and analysis of the geospatial data, which are presented in the article Hydroclimatic vulnerability of peat carbon in the central Congo Basin. The package Age_depth_models includes the data and R codes to run the age/depth models of cores CEN-17.4, LOK5-5 and BDM1-7. The package Tropical_Peats (JupyterHub notebooks https://jupyter.org) includes all the codes for the processing and analysis of the climate spaces (precipitation amount and seasonality index), tropical peatland distribution and precipitation reconstruction. In summary, the data processing starts with the upload of the CHELSA data Version 1.2 (climatologies) publicly available at https://chelsa-climate.org/downloads/ and of the PEATMAP dataset (current geographical extents of peat-bearing regions) publicly available at https://archive.researchdata.leeds.ac.uk/251/. Then the data are reprojected (if necessary) and downsampled, the tropical areas are extracted, matched, analysed and ultimately plotted. Note that the sedimentary data presented in this study are available at https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.938019