Thinking through how biomass for energy plays out: what can we learn from the intensive timber management experience?—While biomass utilization for energy generation and to finance fuel treatments may have a lot going for it in many cases, there is also potential for deleterious impacts on ecosystem services such as habitat and nutrient cycling. These unwanted impacts could ripple disruptively through ecosystems with long-lasting effect. SAF should be at the table in developing best management practices for biomass utilization.
Implied strands of this theme
Biomass recovery is one means, not an end nor the only means, when it comes to restoring the health of U.S. forests. As an economic driver of what happens in the forest, a biomass extraction focus can change forest composition and structure, disturbance frequency, nutrient dynamics, and habitat as well as aesthetic aspects of peoples' experience of the forest resource.
Implied questions
- Where are the potentials for unwanted consequences greatest?
- What are the thresholds of biomass extraction beyond which unacceptable degradation of habitat or even ecosystem sustainability become realistic threats?
- Utilizing biomass can cause air quality problems. Where is technology to address pollution problem?
- Parallels to mining industry and reclamation forestry-what can we learn?
- Biomass removal as the 21st century version of timber extraction-what can we learn?
- Biomass utilization impacts task force charter under development (by Bill Rockwell, FSTB Chair)
- Integration of this issue into the Forest Management track at SAF Convention 2010 in Albuquerque (coordinated by Ed Gee)
