The impacts of access infrastructure on temperate and boreal peatlands

Booth, SW, Midgley, NG ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0076-1785, Clewer, T ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-3838-2890 and Turner, L, 2025. The impacts of access infrastructure on temperate and boreal peatlands. Scientific Reports. ISSN 2045-2322

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Abstract

Peatlands, ecosystems rich in organic matter, serve as substantial global carbon sinks and provide numerous ecosystem services. However, they face significant anthropogenic threats, including the construction and use of linear features such as roads, tracks, trails, and footpaths. This systematic review investigates the impacts of these linear features on temperate and boreal peatlands by analysing 81 primary research articles sourced from the Web of Science and Scopus databases, from an initial return of 831 articles. The findings reveal that 73 articles reported significant impacts, predominantly negative, on peatland features and processes in 5 broad categories: soil, vegetation, hydrology, wildlife, and fire dynamics. This includes soil compaction and erosion, plant community change through introduction of non-natives, altered preferential water flow, changes in predator-prey relationships and providing sources of ignition. Roads are the most studied linear feature, followed by tracks/trails and then footpaths, however linear feature type had no significant impact on the net direction of impact which was predominantly negative across feature type. This suggests that there may be a bias in research towards roads owing to their greater permanence and use, despite consistent negative impacts across feature types. Linear feature type also has no impact on the frequency of features/process impacted, which suggests that different types of linear feature impact broadly in similar ways, but it is the scale and severity of this impact that varies between feature types with different characteristics. Soil was negatively impacted significantly more than hydrology, wildlife and fire dynamics, but equal to vegetation, which was impacted significantly more than wildlife and fire dynamics. Impacts to soil and vegetation are easily observable at local and landscape scale, which again supports the premise that linear feature categories have similar impacts, but the scale and severity may vary. This work highlights that while substantial research has focused on the adverse effects of roads, there is a notable gap in understanding the specific impacts of other linear features, and future work should focus on evaluating impacts across linear feature categories and scales, to inform sustainable management practices.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Scientific Reports
Creators:	Booth, S.W., Midgley, N.G., Clewer, T. and Turner, L.
Publisher:	Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date:	2025
ISSN:	2045-2322
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1038/s41598-025-28323-9 DOI 2539973 Other
Rights:	© The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Divisions:	Schools > School of Animal, Rural and Environmental Sciences
Record created by:	Laura Borcherds
Date Added:	28 Nov 2025 13:25
Last Modified:	28 Nov 2025 13:25
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/54824

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