“Models without data are fantasy, and data without models are chaos.”
“That’s a nice quote by Patrick Crill, a fellow peatland and trace gas researcher. We biogeochemical modellers seek to create models that facilitate projections and make it possible to explore different scenarios,” Research Professor Steve Frolking says.
Coming from the University of New Hampshire in the US, Frolking spent the first half of 2018 at UEF under a Fulbright-Saastamoinen fellowship in environmental sciences, hosted by Professor Eeva-Stiina Tuittila at the School of Forest Sciences.
“Steve and I have been collaborating on peatland research for many years, but not as much as we would have liked to. When the fellowship became available here in Joensuu, I immediately thought of getting him here,” Tuittila says.
According to Steve Frolking , the community of peatland researchers is really collaborative and friendly.
Frolking has been busy at UEF. He serves in a foreign collaborator capacity in an international research proposal led by Tuittila, and has contributed to three research papers during his time in Finland. “All of them unplanned,” he adds, grinning. He has also supervised students, taught a PhD course, and given talks on peatlands and greenhouse gases.
Frolking specialises in biogeochemical modelling, and he is interested in broad patterns in time or space. “Biogeochemical modelling seeks to synthesise an understanding of a system. For instance, a lot of people are measuring a lot of things in environmental science and ecology, and it is our job to create a coherent whole of it all. Models also allow you to explore the effects of changes along the way and, in a best-case scenario, models can inform policy-making.”
“I like working with people who actually do research in peatlands, like Eeva-Stiina. There is a bit of creative tension in our collaboration, because she knows a lot of details, and I usually want to leave most of them out to make models simpler. But we always have a good dialogue to get to the core of the issue at hand,” Frolking says cheerfully.
What he isn’t so cheerful about, though, is the alarmism around peatlands and climate change. Peatlands, especially those up in the north, are sometimes referred to as a “carbon bomb”.
“Yes, there is a lot of carbon in peatlands and there is a lot of uncertainty about the fate of this carbon as permafrost thaws. However, I think there is also a fair bit of alarmism. We shouldn’t be talking about a carbon bomb, when the reality is more of a persistent fizzle,” he says.
Peatlands have been slowly sequestering carbon for millennia, and now they could be slowly releasing it for centuries to come.
“In that sense, we are likely to be battling headwind as we try to manage carbon in the atmosphere by sequestration. But to put things into perspective, the impact of peatlands as they are today is much smaller than the impact of humans burning fossil fuels for industry.”