A broad area of open land, often high But poorly drained, with patches of heath and peat bogs.
Under a blazing sun, farmers were digging trenches in Nizhny Novgorod on Sunday to stop wildfires in nearby forests and peat bogs from advancing on their land.
Scottish peat bogs hold three-quarters of all the carbon in British ecosystems - equivalent to around a century of emissions from fossil fuel burning.
Burning in dry peat bogs and forests, the fires produced a dense plume of smoke that reached across hundreds of kilometers.
One of the big risks for any construction on peat bogs is that the disrupted drainage will cause whole hillsides of waterlogged or dried out peat to slide and eventually oxidise.
There is probably some double-counting in the two sets of figures, because many peat bogs are found in forests, and are thus drained as those forests are cleared.
Some of the most beautiful areas of England are releasing millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year because of damage to peat bogs, environment watchdogs have warned.
