2 research outputs found
Downgrading Recent Estimates of Land Available for Biofuel Production
Recent estimates of additional land available for bioenergy
production
range from 320 to 1411 million ha. These estimates were generated
from four scenarios regarding the types of land suitable for bioenergy
production using coarse-resolution inputs of soil productivity, slope,
climate, and land cover. In this paper, these maps of land availability
were assessed using high-resolution satellite imagery. Samples from
these maps were selected and crowdsourcing of Google Earth images
was used to determine the type of land cover and the degree of human
impact. Based on this sample, a set of rules was formulated to downward
adjust the original estimates for each of the four scenarios that
were previously used to generate the maps of land availability for
bioenergy production. The adjusted land availability estimates range
from 56 to 1035 million ha depending upon the scenario and the ruleset
used when the sample is corrected for bias. Large forest areas not
intended for biofuel production purposes were present in all scenarios.
However, these numbers should not be considered as definitive estimates
but should be used to highlight the uncertainty in attempting to quantify
land availability for biofuel production when using coarse-resolution
inputs with implications for further policy development