Peatland Communities Map

The Peatland Communities Map is a living, collective map of the communities that care for peatlands. It gathers information about who is doing the work and about the local initiatives they have built to protect the peatlands they call home. Stories, actions, and tools from Venice Agreement peatland custodians will be woven throughout as the VA Commons grows — in support of peatland justice and protection.

The map is alive and growing. If you would like your community to be included, please fill out the form — every voice makes the map more complete and the movement more visible.

Add your peatland to the map - Google Form

Humedal Huairavo

Subantarctic Forest

Navarino island, Magallanes, Chile

Comité Ambiental Comunal CAC

The Huairavo wetland is a peatland ecosystem with limited human activity within its boundaries; its area has been reduced due to urban expansion. It is fragmented into three sections, primarily due to the construction of pedestrian paths and the road network.

Its outline and perimeter are bordered by native woodland vegetation, featuring species typical of the Subantarctic Region (lenga, coigüe, and ñirre), which mark a transition zone between the surrounding public roads and the peatland.

For its part, the peatland consists mainly of Sphagnum moss, intermixed with rush species, which further confirms the area as a site of ancestral use for the Yagan Community.

Karukinka Park peatlands

Subantartic Ecosystem

Tierra del Fuego, Magallanes, Chile

Wildlife Conservation Society & Fundacion Hach Saye

Karukinka Park is home to species and ecosystems of global importance and great biodiversity value. Its temperate forests, unique at this latitude, cover vast areas of southern Tierra del Fuego; the steppe or pampa features stunted shrublands adapted to conditions of low moisture; the coast of Karukinka Park, north of Seno del Almirantazgo, serves as a refuge for unique colonies of birds and mammals; the peatlands—peat wetlands—sequester significant amounts of carbon and regulate hydrological cycles; and the Andean ecosystem, dominated by herbaceous vegetation or shrubs adapted to low temperatures and wind, is crowned by majestic condors.

Insel Koos

Baltic Sea Ecosystem

North East Germany (State of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern)

Sensing Peat Arts and Research Platform at Michael Succow Foundation / Greifswald Mire Centre

Nestled at the edge of the Greifswalder Bodden, where the land meets the vastness of the baltic sea, lies Insel Koos, surrounded by a sprawling nature reserve. The Karrendorfer Wiesen, a peninsula, extends into the coastal lowland, creating a unique transition between the saltwater of the Bodden and solid land. Covering approximately 1,560 hectares, these coastal floodplain wetlands are a natural habitat that has been shaped over centuries of use and destruction, yet still retains a remarkable resilience.

This territory is the legacy of a landscape that, though once torn from its natural dynamics by drainage and diking, is gradually being revived through careful restoration projects and protection efforts. Today, the Karrendorfer Wiesen form one of the most valuable nature conservation areas along the Bodden coast of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, providing a sanctuary for numerous rare and endangered plant and animal species.

This is an excerpt of Yasmeen Al-Qaisi's "~ ~ ° word of ~ ° ~ ~", sound piece and poem, created with Koos peatland in the frame of Sensing Peat in 2024

a bunch of boggy peaty grassy sloppy sedgy tongues keep the well-preserved information paradoxically distorted through different readings over time. When trying to be deciphered, these tongues bubble language that eventually decays into communication unintelligible to human ears, bodies and embodiment. Can we read, taste, write and be with a bog? Maybe mirroring as sph sph sph agnum floating between lakes, these tongues come and go with migratory x-ozauria and are speculated upon by beings of the forensic o omen o exēgētḗs.

The full sound piece is accessible here.

VA Commons: Stories, Actions & Other Tools

The VA Commons is a collectively operated space for community exchange, transdisciplinary knowledge production, peatland education, and multidimensional conservation strategies - currently in development.

When it launches, each community on the Peatland Communities Map will have its own page: a living home for their stories, actions, and tools. Here, communities will be able to find and share materials from community-based actions, multidisciplinary research, and trans-local peatland protection work from around the world - including documentation of local actions, arts projects, education and policy materials, community knowledges, transdisciplinary and scientific research, and stories in oral, song, written, and audiovisual forms, as well as mobilising tools for imagining and organising peatland justice.

“Stories are among our most potent tools for restoring the land as well as our relationships to the land.”

– Robin Wall Kimmerer

Because stories are alive, the VA Commons will invite storytelling in different mediums and registers - by and for peatland inhabitants, artists, scientists, ecologists, climate activists, researchers, policy workers, and community organisers. If you would like your community’s stories and tools to be part of the Commons at launch, please fill out the form.

Create your contribution to the VA Commons - Google Form

Peatland Communities Map

VA Commons: Stories, Actions & Other Tools

“Stories are among our most potent tools for restoring the land as well as our relationships to the land.”

VA Workshops

The Agreement