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Belarus’ degraded peatlands: a chance to become mires again
Before a massive draining of peatlands was launched in the second half of the 20th century Belarus owned 2.4 million hectares of natural mires. Between 1960 and 1980, one million hectares of mires were drained for agriculture, 300,000 ha were drained for forestry and another 286,000 ha for peat mining. After peat was extracted, damaged peatlands were converted to agricultural land for further use. However, in actual practice the efforts to cultivate degraded peatlands turned out ineffective, and such lands were generally abandoned.