Maps of peatlands in the forested landscape of Sweden

Lukas Rimondini, Gustaf Hugelius, Thomas Gumbricht, Anders Ahlström

This dataset contains binary raster maps showing presence-or-not of peatlands in the forested landscape of Sweden. Four different binary rasters are provided, representing different peatland definitions: 30, 40, 50 and 100 cm thickness of the organic (O) horizon.

Northern peatlands are major carbon deposits with important implications for the global climate system, and it is crucial to understand their spatial occurrence. These maps are of both societal and scientific value, and may be employed for spatial planning, estimate carbon stocks and evaluate climate change mitigation strategies.

The maps have a nationwide extent at 10 m spatial resolution and were produced by applying machine learning methods to soil data and LiDAR-based terrain indices. The soil data describes the thickness of the O-horizon and were extracted from the Swedish Forest Soil Inventory (SFSI) and the Peat archive of the Geological Survey of Sweden (SGU).

Citation

Lukas Rimondini, Gustaf Hugelius, Thomas Gumbricht, Anders Ahlström (2023) Maps of peatlands in the forested landscape of Sweden. Dataset version 1. Bolin Centre Database. https://doi.org/10.17043/rimondini-2023-peatlands-1

Data description

The dataset includes four GeoTIFF (.tif) files with the following specifications:

• File size: 358266⁠ – ⁠402519 kB
• Data type: Byte
• EPSG: 3006
• Pixel size: 10×10 m
• Width: 65750
• Height: 154000
• Origin: 265000,7672500
• Compression: LZW
• Overview images: True

Raster values:

• 0 = Non-peatland
• 1 = Peatland

Peatlands (Value=1) are areas with an organic soil horizon >= threshold. The thresholds are 30 cm (Peat30.tif), 40 cm (Peat40.tif), 50 cm (Peat50.tif) and 100 cm (Peat100.tif).

Comments

Depending on peatland definition, testing with a hold-out dataset indicated Accuracy of 0.89⁠ – ⁠0.91 and Matthew’s correlation coefficient of 0.79⁠ – ⁠0.81. The final maps showed a national forest peatland extent of 60,726⁠ – ⁠72,604 km², estimates which are in range with previous studies employing traditional soil maps.