Ecosystem Services from Cellulosic Biofuel Production Systems on Marginal Lands.

Biofuel production legislated in the US and Europe is deflecting food crops toward grain-based ethanol production, which can have detrimental consequences for soil carbon sequestration, nitrous oxide emissions, nitrate pollution, biodiversity, and human health. An alternative is to grow cellulosic feedstocks on so-called marginal lands. Cellulosic feedstocks can have positive environmental outcomes and could make up a significant proportion of future energy portfolios. If grown on marginal lands, these feedstocks could also avoid food-fuel competition and provide a number of ecosystem services other than biomass production. Here we describe efforts to quantify a number of such services for candidate feedstock systems now being evaluated at sites in the Upper Great Lakes region as part of the DOE Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center. Documented services span a wide range of provisioning, regulating, and supporting services; we highlight here climate mitigation and nitrogen conservation services provided by biofuel cropping systems that span a range of management intensities and biodiversity levels. Continuous corn, switchgrass, miscanthus, old fields, and native prairie systems differ significantly in their environmental outcomes and responses to inputs.