A sustainability framework for assessing studies about marginal lands for planting perennial energy crops

Wei Jiang, Michael G. Jacobson, Matthew H. Langholtz

Research output: Contribution to journalReview articlepeer-review

20 Scopus citations

Abstract

One of the issues with large-scale perennial energy crop production is increasing land use competition between ‘food and feed’ and ‘fuel’. A commonly suggested solution is to limit energy crop plantation to marginal lands. However, the concept and the methods used to assess marginal lands remain vague and inconsistent across bioenergy-related studies. We propose a sustainability-based framework to review and classify studies for marginal lands used for bioenergy crops. This framework innovatively puts the marginal land in a sustainability-based framework, showing the interaction of biophysical, socioeconomic, qualitative, and quantitative assessments. We found that current studies lack integration of biophysical and socioeconomic considerations in the marginal land analysis. They also lack qualitative approaches to assess marginal land. We suggest that future work should emphasize integrating biophysical, socioeconomic, quantitative, and qualitative analysis for sustainable marginal land identification and use.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)228-240
Number of pages13
JournalBiofuels, Bioproducts and Biorefining
Volume13
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 1 2019

Funding

This work received funding from the Northeast Woody/Warm-season Biomass Consortium (NEWBio), which was supported by Agriculture and Food Research Initiative Competitive Grant No. 2012-68005-19703 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. This work received funding from the Northeast Woody/ Warm-season Biomass Consortium (NEWBio), which was supported by Agriculture and Food Research Initiative Competitive Grant No. 2012-68005-19703 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

Keywords

  • bioenergy crops
  • marginal lands
  • miscanthus
  • shrub willow
  • sustainability
  • switchgrass

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