Blanket bog

Blanket bog or Blanket Mire is an area of peatland, forming where there is a climate of high rainfall and a low level of evapotranspiration, allowing peat to develop not only in wet hollows but over large expanses of undulating ground. The blanketing of the ground with a variable depth of peat gives the habitat type its name. Blanket bogs are found extensively throughout the northern hemisphere - well-studied examples are found in the Ireland and Great Britain, but vast areas of the Russian and Canadian tundra also qualify as blanket bogs. In the southern hemisphere they are less well-developed due to the relatively low latitudes of the main land areas, though similar environments are reported in Patagonia, the Falkland Islands and New Zealand. It is debatable if the extremely impoverished plant faunas of Antarctica are sufficiently well developed to consider as blanket bogs.

In many areas the peat is cultivated as a fossil fuel and used either in electricity generation or domestic solid fuel for heating. In the Republic of Ireland a state owned agency, Bord na Mona, controls a lot of the blanket bogs and harvests peat for electricity generation.

Some blanket bogs are now preserved by government organisations in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, as this habitat is now under threat from extensive harvesting. Examples of protected blanket bogs include Sliabh Beagh and Airds Moss.

ee also

* Peat
* String bog