Criteria and indicators for peatland restoration

Criteria and indicators for peatland
monitoring: what could go wrong?
• Over-reliance on single indicators (or indices)
• Reporting indicators without contextual data
• Accurate indicators nobody can measure
• Monitoring without benefits for local communities

Useful criteria and indicators
• Research waste because different teams measure and report
different indicators in different ways, so findings cannot be
synthesized
• Policy should be based on synthesis not individual studies
• We need agreement on core indicators that can be measured
by the majority of monitoring programmes in comparable ways
• We need diversity indicators and the freedom to measure what
we think is important, but we must balance this against the need
to synthesise/compare for evidence-based policy and practice

mark.reed@sruc.ac.uk
@profmarkreed