Sustainable Land Management for Bioenergy Crops

We provide insights from a five year National Science Foundation project focused on the development of spatially explicit maps of sustainable, regional “hot spots” for the large scale deployment of perennial bioenergy crops (e.g., miscanthus and switchgrass) in the United States. With environmental and economic sustainability as principal constraints, our approach integrates climate, land surface, ecosystem, and economic models. We identify “hot spots” (high suitability areas) where there is evidence of atmospheric cooling without a corresponding deterioration of water resources (e.g., significant soil moisture reduction) and simulate biomass yields on marginal lands that become inputs to our economic optimization model.