KDF Search Results

Logging and mill residues are currently the largest sources of woody biomass for bioenergy in the US, but short-rotation woody crops (SRWCs) are expected to become a larger contributor to biomass production, primarily on lands marginal for food production. However, there are very few studies on the environmental effects of SRWCs, and most have been conducted at stand rather than at watershed scales.

Synthesis manuscript for an Ecology & Society Special Feature on Telecoupling: A New Frontier for Global Sustainability

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Co-Optimization (Co-Optima) initiative is accelerating the introduction of affordable, scalable, and sustainable fuels and high-efficiency, low-emission engines with a first-of-its-kind effort to simultaneously tackle fuel and engine research and development (R&D).

Understanding the complex interactions among food security, bioenergy sustainability, and resource management
requires a focus on specific contextual problems and opportunities. The United Nations’ 2030 Sustainable
Development Goals place a high priority on food and energy security; bioenergy plays an important role in
achieving both goals. Effective food security programs begin by clearly defining the problem and asking, ‘What
can be done to assist people at high risk?’ Simplistic global analyses, headlines, and cartoons that blame biofuels

Abstract: Cellulosic-based biofuels are needed to help meet energy needs and to strengthen rural investment and development in the midwestern United States (US). This analysis identifies 11 categories of indicators to measure progress toward sustainability that should be monitored to determine if ecosystem and social services are being maintained, enhanced, or disrupted by production, harvest, storage, and transport of cellulosic feedstock.

Nitrogen (N) is an important nutrient as it often limits productivity, but in excess can impair water quality. Most studies on watershed N cycling have occurred in upland forested catchments where snowmelt dominates N export; fewer studies have focused on low-relief watersheds that lack snow. We examined watershed N cycling in three adjacent, low-relief watersheds in the Upper Coastal Plain of the southeastern United States to better understand the role of hydrological flowpaths and biological transformations of N at the watershed scale.

Peer-reviewed letter written in response to a March 11, 2015, letter to US EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy (http://bit.ly/1HsSaWf), in which the Ecological Society of America objected to EPA’s proposal that sustainably harvested woody biomass could reduce carbon emissions.

A framework for selecting and evaluating indicators of bioenergy sustainability is presented.
This framework is designed to facilitate decision-making about which indicators are useful for assessing
sustainability of bioenergy systems and supporting their deployment. Efforts to develop sustainability
indicators in the United States and Europe are reviewed. The fi rst steps of the framework for
indicator selection are defi ning the sustainability goals and other goals for a bioenergy project or program,

Agroecosystem models that can incorporate management practices and quantify environmental effects
are necessary to assess sustainability-associated food and bioenergy production across spatial scales.
However, most agroecosystem models are designed for a plot scale. Tremendous computational capacity
on simulations and datasets is needed when large scales of high-resolution spatial simulations are conducted.
We used the message passing interface (MPI) parallel technique and developed a master–slave

Landscape design provides an approach under which bioenergy production systems can be integrated into other components of the land, environment and socioeconomic system. Landscape design is a spatially explicit collaborative plan for resource allocation and management. It should be applied to a particular area and developed with the involvement of key stakeholders.

The Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Technologies Office held a workshop on "Social Aspects of Bioenergy" on April 24, 2012, in Washington, D.C., and convened a webinar on this topic on May 8, 2012. The workshop addressed questions about how to measure and understand the social impacts of bioenergy production based on a set of social sustainability indicators for bioenergy that were developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The sustainability of future bioenergy production rests on more than continual improvements in its environmental, economic, and social impacts. The emergence of new biomass feedstocks, an expanding array of conversion pathways, and expected increases in overall bioenergy production are connecting diverse technical, social, and policy communities. These stakeholder groups have different—and potentially conflicting—values and cultures, and therefore different goals and decision making processes. Our aim is to discuss the implications of this diversity for bioenergy researchers.

a b s t r a c t
The economic availability of biomass resources is a critical component in evaluating the commercial
viability of biofuels. To evaluate projected farmgate prices and grower payments needed to procure 295
million dry Mg (325 million dry tons) of biomass in the U.S. by 2022, this research employs POLYSYS, an
economic model of the U.S. agriculture sector. A price-run simulation suggests that a farmgate price of
$58.42 Mg1 ($53.00 dry ton1) is needed to procure this supply, while a demand-run simulation

Indicators of the environmental sustainability of biofuel production, distribution, and use should be selected, measured, and interpreted with respect to the context in which they are used. The context of a sustainability assessment includes the purpose, the particular biofuel production and distribution system, policy conditions, stakeholder values, location, temporal influences, spatial scale, baselines, and reference scenarios.

Indicators of the environmental sustainability of biofuel production, distribution, and use should be selected, measured, and interpreted with respect to the context in which they are used. The context of a sustainability assessment includes the purpose, the particular biofuel production and distribution system, policy conditions, stakeholder values, location, temporal influences, spatial scale, baselines, and reference scenarios.

The production of biobased feedstocks (i.e., plant– or algal-based material use for transportation fuels, heat, power and bioproducts) for energy consumption has been expanding rapidly in recent years. Biomass now accounts for 4.1% of total U.S. primary energy production. Unfortunately, there are considerable knowledge gaps relative to implications of this industry expansion for wildlife.

Landscape ecology focuses on the spatial patterns and processes of ecological and human interactions. These patterns and processes are being altered by both changing resource-management practices of humans and changing climate conditions associated, in part, with increases in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. Dominant resource-extraction and land-management activities involve energy, and the use of fossil energy is one of the key drivers behind increasing greenhouse gas emissions as well as land-use changes.

Landscape implications of bioenergy feedstock choices are significant and depend on land-use practices and their environmental impacts. Although land-use changes and carbon emissions associated with bioenergy feedstock production are dynamic and complicated, lignocellulosic feedstocks may offer opportunities that enhance sustainability when compared to other transportation fuel alternatives.

Adding bioenergy to the U.S. energy portfolio requires long‐term profitability for bioenergy producers and
long‐term protection of affected ecosystems. In this study, we present steps along the path toward evaluating both sides of
the sustainability equation (production and environmental) for switchgrass (Panicum virgatum) using the Soil and Water
Assessment Tool (SWAT). We modeled production of switchgrass and river flow using SWAT for current landscapes at a

The U.S. Department of Energy Biomass Program sponsored the Land-Use Change and Bioenergy workshop in Vonore, Tennessee, from May 11 to May 14, 2009. More than 50 experts from around the world gathered to review the state of the science, identify opportunities for collaboration, and prioritize next steps for the research and data needed to address key issues regarding the land-use effects of bioenergy policies. A key outcome of the workshop was the identification of research areas that may improve our understanding of land-use change in a bioenergy context.