Tropical and subtropical wetlands distribution

Peatlands; Peat; Wetlands
Climate change; Energy and low carbon development
English
United States Agency for International Development (USAID)
Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR)
2017
Spatial

Wetlands are important providers of ecosystem services and key regulators of climate change. They positively contribute to global warming through their greenhouse gas emissions, and negatively through the accumulation of organic material in histosols, particularly in peatlands.

Our understanding of wetlands’ services is currently constrained by limited knowledge on their distribution, extent, volume, inter-annual flood variability, and disturbance levels. We present an expert system approach to estimate wetland and peatland areas, depths and volumes, which relies on three biophysical indices related to wetland and peat formation:

1. Long-term water supply exceeding atmospheric water demand;
2. annually or seasonally water-logged soils;
3. geomorphological position where water is supplied and retained.

This dataset is the second version, with significant improvements compared to previous versions. It shows the distribution of wetlands, peatlands, and peat depth that covers the tropics and sub tropics (40° N to 60° S; 180° E to -180° W), excluding small islands. It was mapped in 231 meters spatial resolution.

The dataset can be viewed in this interactive map: http://www.cifor.org/global-wetlands.

Terms of use
Credit

This dataset applies the Community Norms of Dataverse, where this dataset is originally deposited. These Community Norms, as well as good scientific practices, expect that proper credit is given via citation. No waiver has been selected for this dataset and it is subject to the relevant licensing agreements.

Licensing

These data and documents are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. You may copy, distribute and transmit the data as long as you acknowledge the source through proper data citation.

Citation

Gumbricht, T.; Román-Cuesta, R.M.; Verchot, L.V; Herold, M; Wittmann, F; Householder, E.; Herold, N.; Murdiyarso, D., 2017, “Tropical and Subtropical Wetlands Distribution version 2”, https://doi.org/10.17528/CIFOR/DATA.00058, Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), V2.

Please see the individual data files for file-specific citations.

Title

Tropical and subtropical wetlands distribution (Version 2.1)

Authors

T. Gumbricht; R. M. Román-Cuesta; L. V. Verchot; M. Herold; F. Wittmann; E. Householder; N. Herold; D. Murdiyarso

Citation

Gumbricht, T.; Román-Cuesta, R.M.; Verchot, L.V; Herold, M; Wittmann, F; Householder, E.; Herold, N.; Murdiyarso, D., 2017, “Tropical and Subtropical Wetlands Distribution version 2”, https://doi.org/10.17528/CIFOR/DATA.00058, Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), V2.

Dataset persistent ID

doi.org/10.17528/CIFOR/DATA.00058

Contact

Email Us

Tropical and subtropical wetlands distribution data files

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It was mapped in 231 meters spatial resolution. Warning: A validation of our depth map against ground measured peat depths (i.e. soil profiles) suggests that our deepest values (>10m) overestimate depth. For this reason, all depths >10m have been thresholded to 10m.

File name: Tropical and Subtropical Peatdepth.7z

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It was mapped in 231 meters spatial resolution by combining a hydrological model and annual time series of satellite-derived estimates of soil moisture to represent water flow and surface wetness that are then combined with geomorphological data.

File name: Tropical and Subtropical Wetlands.7z

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It was mapped in 231 meters spatial resolution. Peat is here defined as any soil having at least 30cm of decomposed or semi-decomposed organic material with at least 50% of organic matter. This corresponds to 29% of carbon content using 1.72 as the transformation factor. The peatland map is produced by adding the peat forming wetlands: mangrove (20), swamp/bog (30), Fen (40), riverine (50), and floodswamps (60) (note: the number in parentheses refer to pixel code of each class in Wetlands dataset). Our map of peatlands was contrasted against n=275 geo-positioned soil profiles containing peat, with 65% of agreement. Further fieldwork is however needed to validate our map. Mangroves are here considered to host the thresholds of depth and organic matter content needed for peat definition, although mineral soil may prevail. Mangroves contribute with ca. 180,000 km2 to the 1.7 million km2 of peatlands (11%), which would need further ground validation (i.e. in areas like Indonesian Papua have large extents of mangrove that contribute to peat, which would need ground-truthing to validate if they contain peat as defined here).

File name: TROP-SUBTROP_PeatV21_2016_CIFOR.7z

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