70th SWCS International Annual Conference July 26-29, 2015 Greensboro, NC

1. Incorporating bioenergy in sustainable
landscape designs
M. Cristina Negri1 and Virginia Dale2
1Principal Agronomist, Energy Systems Division, Argonne National Laboratory
2Oak Ridge National Laboratory Corporate Fellow
A discussion of bioenergy’s potential role in conservation from two DOE workshops

2. Agriculture’s sustainability challenge
 Providing food, feed, fiber, energy for a growing world population
 Conserving soil, water and biodiversity, and decreasing greenhouse gases
 Providing resilience to a changing climate
Questions for bioenergy development
 Is there sufficient land?
 Is land for food and conservation impacted?
 Do we have the right crops?
 What are the impacts to water quality and quantity?
 Is there a better way to plan for our resources?
2
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Source: U.S. Global Change Research
Program http://e360.yale.edu/feature
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ngs_impact_on_us/2166/

3. Bioenergy Context
 Concerns over land use change, environmental impacts,
and socioeconomic viability are major barriers to the
production of bioenergy feedstock, while lack of
bioenergy feedstock is one of the many barriers to the
creation of a robust supply chain for bioenergy
production.
 Sustainable bioenergy production aims at minimizing land
use change, reduce or even improve water quality
concerns, greenhouse gas emissions, maintain or improve
soil quality and soil organic carbon, and protect wildlife
and biodiversity while being economically worthy and
socially acceptable.
• Landscape design has emerged as a promising approach to embed bioenergy
crops into working landscapes so that the negative impacts are minimized and
environmental services are enhanced.

4. Landscape design
 A spatially explicit collaborative plan for resource
allocation and management
 Potentially an approach to optimize the
provisioning of food, feed, energy, fiber and
conservation.
 Long lived production systems like forests and
wood production in the U.S. Southeast already
implement some forms of landscape design out
of planning necessity
 In an annual crop landscape, considerations are
given to marginal land to integrate bioenergy
crops with row crops.

5. Designing landscapes to include bioenergy
shifting perspective to address issues - “precision bioenergy”
5
NUTRIENT LOADINGS
• Exploit deep rooted perennials to capture runoff and subsurface flow in strips and target areas
• Beneficially reuse nutrients lost from other crops to enhance biomass yields
WATER QUANTITY
• Design planting to match water budget
• Preferentially target marginal water
GRASSLAND CONVERSION AND DEFORESTATION
• Sustainably intensify arable land production through resource allocation planning
BIODIVERSITY
• Use bioenergy crops as shelter, connectivity and nesting opportunities to support biodiversity

6. Two workshops
 Workshop #1- March 4-6, 2014, New Bern, NC
– Focus on bioenergy systems that utilize forest biomass as feedstocks
– To identify principles for landscape design for bioenergy systems
that, when implemented, will assist deployment and assessment of
such systems across the supply chain.
 Workshop #2- June 24-26, 2013, Argonne IL
– Focus on US Midwestern Corn Belt region/Agricultural/row crops
landscape
– To develop an understanding of the state of the science, research
needs, tools and methodologies for the implementation,
demonstration and monitoring of landscape design for bioenergy
systems across the supply chain as defined in Workshop 1.
 Participants included National Labs, Government (DOE, USDA,
EPA …), Academia, Non Profits, Farmers and producers, Industry.
Each participant provided their take on a common interest.
 The U.S. DOE , Bioenergy Technologies Office sponsored the
workshops.

7. Workshop themes
 Discussed principles of landscape design and how it
can assist in the deployment and assessment of
sustainable bioenergy
 How to move forward to best serve industry,
decision makers and producers and achieve
environmental goals
 Bioenergy from residues, energy crops
 Water quality was a central theme, others included
biodiversity, wildlife, socioeconomic sustainability
and social acceptance, air quality, logistics.
 What analytical/planning/monitoring tools do we
have available
 What are the needs for future development and
research.

8. Key Questions
 Is Landscape design a course of action to
consider to move forwards, and if so, how can it
be implemented?
 Are the needed design and monitoring tools
available?
 What are the short-term goals that can be
achieved?
 If we address these, will we be maturing towards
broader markets?
 Can we establish initiatives at the local scale to
demonstrate and promote landscape based
bioenergy systems?
 What is the role of certification in promoting
bioenergy?
 What is the role of ecosystems services valuation
in building a rural bioeconomy?

9. Different scales in different landscapes, different issues:
The Southeast
 Forestry: long timeframes lend
themselves to the long term planning
implicit in landscape design
 In the Southeast landscape, need to
determine processes and decide on
overall goals for landscape design
 Process could include zoning, plans for
economic growth, targets for air and
water quality, aesthetic concerns, best
management guidelines and practices,
developing strategic partnerships. Target
alignment with regional goals and private
stakeholders to public.
 Residue removal: benefits and concerns
of removing timber residues.

10. Different scales in different landscapes, different issues:
The Midwest
 Annual cropping: time sensitive and frequent decisions
on land cover
 Residues: the debate over soil-friendly stover removal
 Spatial arrangement of crops designed at farm scale with
subfield granularity needs to capture variations in yield
and environmental suitability
 Is there a conflict between landscape patches and ever
larger machinery?
 Prairie Pothole region best management guidelines –
bioenergy for wildlife (NWF)
 Late harvesting
 No till

11. Take homes from the conservation angle
 Overall, there was ample support for integrated landscape design
 Technical presentations showed there is potential for
conservation convergence with bioenergy “done right”
 Holistic planning, the basis for landscape design, uses tools
developed for conservation:
– Physical modeling and geospatial analysis and planning tools to
evaluate site, scale, soil , crop properties
– Tools developed by programs such as CEAP are of tremendous help in
design (e. g. terrain analysis, the science of targeting)
– There is a shared difficulty of documenting water quality
improvements, the scale of problems may be different than the scale
of solutions, and how do we monitor cost-effectively?
 The uncertainty about scientific underpinnings of ecosystem
valuation needs to be addressed
 Biodiversity: is all lost if we have bioenergy monocultures? Can we
include polycultures in bioenergy development? Is there a
technology that will accept a diverse feedstock?

12. Take homes, cont’d
 Stakeholder participation is essential!
 Alternative future scenarios can be used to
provide normative (not predictive) designs
that reflect them
– The use of visualization tools can be effective
to engage stakeholders and encourage
communications across disciplines
– Linking scenarios to physical models allows
detailed predictions of design impacts.
– Meetings discussing the predicted impact of
specific landscape designs on water quality,
carbon accruals, soil quality, nutrient
removal and cycling, yields, economics, and
other indicators can elicit ideas and realistic
assessments of the way forward.

13. On the Policy front
 Incentive structures were deemed more effective than regulations
 Need to address the lack of incentives for managing risky soils
 Need to address farming risks
– No crop insurance for bioenergy crops, and insufficient data on yields to guide it
– Markets need to be more stable – RFS role in establishing markers and supply chain
– Land ownership issues: short term rentals vs perennial crops – this is shared with soil health management
– Crop insurance is withheld for non-compliance with conservation: is vulnerable land ineligible? Where do we draw the
line?
– BCAP does not have specific mechanisms to target land
 Can private-public partnerships be better at valuing multiple ecosystem services? Doe spatial targeting make
some farmers ineligible for compensation?

14. Recommended actions
 Generate an inclusive process of communication. Assemble a collection of case studies to generate ideas.
– Harmonize language!
 Engage stakeholders and understand their points of view and recognize interdependencies
 Promote partnerships to move beyond research, partner with conservation organizations
 Network: connect the expertise available across supply chain
 Learn: what is ongoing, doable, communicate case studies
 Study: look at expiring CRP acres to identify opportunities
 Blend certification programs into landscape design
 Work towards market stability

15. Recommended actions, cont’d
 Develop a value proposition for land managers and show how it works on an individual stakeholder scale
 Develop crop integration plans
 Develop distributed end uses to support local markets – local combustion technology for example
 Develop diverse crop varieties, focus on yields and provisioning of ecosystem services
 Improve analytical models and their ease of use.

16. Conclusions
 Biomass “done right” may share conservation objectives
– The concept of integrated landscape is of interest with and without biomass
– Could biomass cropping be designed to produce both a revenue and ecosystem services?
 Communicate above all
 Partner, demonstrate, adapt.
 Certification may provide the basis of indicators and methods useable in developing metrics for sustainable
landscapes

17. Acknowledgements
 US DOE EERE BETO
– Kristen Johnson, Mark Elless, Max Broad and Daniel Adams
 NCASI
 Weyerhauser
 Workshop participants
 Keith Kline
 Herbert Ssegane, John Murphy, Michael Barrows and Scott Yeaple
Presentations from the workshops are available on line at:
Workshop 1: https://bioenergykdf.net/content/incorporating-bioenergy-sustainable-landscape-
designs%E2%80%94workshop-one-forestry-landscapes
Workshop 2: https://bioenergykdf.net/content/incorporating-bioenergy-sustainable-landscape-
designs%E2%80%94workshop-two-agricultural-landscapes