High-resolution maps expose how fragmented Europe's wetlands have become

A machine-learning analysis of satellite imagery has produced the most detailed maps yet of Europe's wetlands, revealing a landscape that is heavily fragmented and unevenly in need of restoration, researchers report in *Nature* ( The work is summarised in a *Nature* News & Views article published on 20 July (

Kovács et al. mapped six natural and semi-natural open wetland types — including inland marshes, peatbogs, salt marshes, salines, intertidal flats and moors and heathland — at 10-metre resolution across 38 European countries for a 2018 baseline. The model, an XGBoost algorithm trained on 101,000 reference points and fed more than 470,000 Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 radar and optical scenes, achieved an overall accuracy of 96.6%.

The maps show about 413,500 square kilometres of such wetlands — roughly 6.8% of the land surveyed. That matters because, although wetlands cover only 5–8% of Earth's land surface, they hold 20–30% of the planet's soil carbon, an estimated 2,800–4,300 billion tonnes of CO2, and play an outsized role in climate regulation, the authors note.

Europe is a global hotspot of wetland loss: average extent has fallen by more than 50% since 1700 and by over 75% in several countries, mainly through drainage for agriculture and forestry. Against that backdrop, the EU Nature Restoration Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2024/1991) requires degraded ecosystems to be restored to 30% by 2030, 60% by 2040 and 90% by 2050.

The researchers argue that meeting those targets demands high-resolution, standardized and regularly updated mapping of wetland extent, type and disturbance — exactly what their dataset provides — to guide the regulation's Article 4 restoration measures from 2030 onward. The study concludes that Europe's remaining wetlands are highly fragmented, with restoration needs that vary sharply from country to country.