Seitseminen completes more than 30 years of peatland restoration

A more than 30-year effort to restore peatlands in Seitseminen National Park in Pirkanmaa has finished this autumn, with about 1,300 hectares restored, Yle reported. The work covered roughly half of the park.

The latest completed project was at the Venesjärvi bog. Pekka Vesterinen, a senior conservation specialist at Metsähallitus, said he had not expected the work to take more than three decades. Restoration in the park, which is in Ikaalinen and Ylöjärvi, became his life’s work.

About half of the park’s peatlands had been drained to increase timber production before the national park was established in 1982. Plans to restore the bogs began in the early 1990s. At the time, no comparable project had been carried out on such a large scale in Finland, making Seitseminen both a testing ground and a model for later work.

Restoration involves removing trees and blocking drainage ditches. Vesterinen said the first signs of recovery can appear about five years after the ditches are blocked, while it may take 10 to 15 years to be certain that a bog is returning.

The restored peatlands will continue developing towards more natural water conditions without further work by people or machinery. Restoration aims to bring back the habitats of species affected by drainage, including sphagnum mosses and wetland birds. It can also help peatlands retain carbon and filter water.

Experience from Seitseminen has informed restoration work in Estonia, Latvia and Sweden. Metsähallitus Nature Services specialist Santtu Kareksela said an important lesson was how to block ditches and build surface dams so water stays in the bog, allowing biodiversity, carbon storage and filtration to recover.

The project received funding through EU LIFE projects, the METSO programme and the Ministry of the Environment’s Helmi Habitat Programme. The EU’s 2024 Nature Restoration Regulation requires member states to restore degraded ecosystems, including drained peatlands. Private landowners are also encouraged to take part, with nature-value markets among the means of compensating them for restoration work.