International assessment of bioenergy stakeholders research requirements of GIS based biomass analytics

Feb 2022
Publications

Open access article in the Journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, based on work performed within IEA Bioenergy Task 43 (Biomass supply).

https://www.agriculturejournals.cz/web/jfs.htm?type=article&id=31_2019-JFS

As the demand and production for renewable energies increases there is a growing need for research to increase the efficiency, productivity and profitability of production. Geographic information systems (GIS) research and technologies can be beneficial to the bioenergy industry. GIS programs can display the spatial distribution of various types of biomass and select areas that could be used to produce bioenergy crops. Remote sensing can be used in forestry and agriculture to estimate the volume of biomass within a region that could be mobilized and its economic viability. This study aimed to determine what category of GIS-based research biomass/bioenergy stakeholders consider the most valuable. A voluntary questionnaire was distributed to bioenergy stakeholders from a variety of countries to discern perceived usefulness ratings for various analytics. Participants of the survey (predominantly economic actors) rated economic analytics as the most useful followed by environmental, product quality and social assessments.

 

Highly scored economic analytics include:

  • Annual availability of biomass by type within the limits of current harvesting technologies and practices.
  • Biomass collection/processing cost ($ per tonne) from farm/forest to roadside/landing/farm gate.
  • Biomass transportation cost ($ per tonne) of the collected biomass from the roadside/ landing to a defined point of end user

Highly scored environmental analytics include:

  • Availability of each type of biomass considering forest/farm sustainability
  • Availability of each type of biomass considering maintaining soil nutrients and reducing fertilizers application.
  • Availability of each type of biomass in terms of reducing soil erosion risk, reducing soil salinity, etc.
  • Compliance of each type of biomass with government legislation.

 

Citation: Heeley B., Ghaffariyan M., Srivastava S. (2019) International assessment of bioenergy stakeholders research requirements of GIS based biomass analytics. J. For. Sci., 65: 234–246