Source: COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY submitted to NRP
SUSTAINABLE BIOFUEL FEEDSTOCKS FROM BEETLE-KILL WOOD: BIOENERGY ALLIANCE NETWORK OF THE ROCKIES (BANR)
Sponsoring Institution
National Institute of Food and Agriculture
Project Status
COMPLETE
Funding Source
AFRI COMPETITIVE GRANT
Reporting Frequency
Annual
Accession No.
1001665
Grant No.
2013-68005-21298
Cumulative Award Amt.
$9,820,000.00
Proposal No.
2013-03867
Multistate No.
(N/A)
Project Start Date
Sep 1, 2013
Project End Date
Aug 31, 2020
Grant Year
2018
Program Code
[A6101]- Development and Sustainable Production of Regionally Appropriate Biomass Feedstocks, AFRI
Recipient Organization
COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY
(N/A)
FORT COLLINS,CO 80523
Performing Department
Soil and Crop Sciences
Non Technical Summary
Infestations of pine and spruce bark beetles have caused widespread mortality in coniferous forests in the Rocky Mountains over the past decade, with ~42 million acres of U.S. forests impacted since 1996, a trend is only likely to intensify with future global climate change. The resulting beetle-killed wood represents a vast, high-density bioenergy resource that requires no cultivation, circumvents food-versus-fuel concerns, and likely has a highly favorable carbon balance compared to most other forestry systems due to the underlying disturbance to ecosystem carbon stocks and net productivity. Beetle-killed biomass is typically located far from urban industrial centers, in relatively inaccessible areas with challenging topography; thus harvest and transportation costs have been a key barrier to more widespread utilization of the resource. However, recent advances in mobile thermochemical conversion technologies are enabling the production of advanced liquid biofuel feedstocks and co-products on-site, thus bypassing this fundamental constraint. Cool Planet Energy Systems has been a driving force in this field, and their prototype pyrolysis system can be deployed in close proximity to beetle-killed timber and other sources of non-commercial woody feedstocks. However, significant technical and knowledge barriers to the widespread deployment of such systems in beetle-disturbed forests still exist, and environmental footprints, social issues, and local policy constraints remain largely unexplored. Our proposed project, Sustainable biofuel feedstocks from beetle-killed wood: Bioenergy Alliance Network of the Rockies (BANR), will develop a comprehensive program to address the major challenges limiting feedstock development, production, logistics and utilization of insect-killed trees in the Rockies. Research tasks will be undertaken to create a spatial atlas of wood availability, advance the logistics of harvest and preprocessing, explore issues of quality with respect to thermochemical conversion, undertake comprehensive economic, environmental, and social/policy assessment, and to integrate research results into a web-based user-friendly decision support system. Educational efforts will include development of middle and high school science units on bioenergy-related topics, professional development and research experiences for K-12 teachers and undergraduates and new courses for undergraduates, graduate students, and K-12 teachers. Extension work will deliver results and tools developed through research and education on ecological, technical, economic and social aspects of bioenergy production from beetle-killed wood, fire hazard reduction and other forest feedstocks.
Animal Health Component
50%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
10%
Applied
50%
Developmental
40%
Classification

Knowledge Area (KA)Subject of Investigation (SOI)Field of Science (FOS)Percent
5110612107030%
5110612202030%
5110612301010%
5110612308010%
5110612302020%
Knowledge Area
511 - New and Improved Non-Food Products and Processes;

Subject Of Investigation
0612 - Conifer forests of the West;

Field Of Science
2020 - Engineering; 1070 - Ecology; 3020 - Education; 3010 - Economics; 3080 - Sociology;
Goals / Objectives
The project objective is to provide the science-­based underpinnings - through targeted research, education, training and extension - to support the development of sustainable biofuel production from beetle-killed wood and other non-commercial woody feedstocks in the Rocky Mountain Region. Expected outcomes will provide new knowledge and solutions for development of sustainable biofuel production systems using beetle-killed and waste wood feedstocks.
Project Methods
Methods inlcude using remote sensing and field sampling to develop a feedstock supply atlas and predict future outbreaks. Feedstock logistics issues will be addressed with field trials and operations modeling and processing of feedstock will be optimized through experimental treatments. System performance and sustainability synthesizes feedstock supply and logistics research with field research on the environmental impacts of harvesting, field research on the agronomic and reclamation benefits of biochar application, life cycle analysis (LCA) of the greenhouse gas (GHG) impacts of the biofuel system and socioeconomic and policy analyses. Additionally, a decision support tool will be developed and deployed on the web that will assess feedstock availability and GHG and environmental footprints for beetle-kill feedstocks. Multiple education and outreach methods are proposed to deliver science-based knowledge to multiple stakeholder groups. Education efforts are aimed at promoting bioenergy literacy for middle and high school students, training teachers on the use and implementation of bio-energy teaching units, providing research experience for teachers and undergraduates, and educate university students through courses on bioenergy-related topics. Extension and outreach efforts are targeted toward communities and stakeholder groups that may take part in a potential beetle-kill biofuel industry. The means of reaching these stakeholder groups include leveraging existing extension programs to disseminate research and innovations, engaging communities and state leaders on identifying and utilizing local resources, and communicating with communities where pilot biofuel projects may be developed. Project evaluation will include self-evaluation in terms of achieving goals and milestones, facilitated with monthly status updates and monitoring by the project Scientific Steering Committee and with the annual all investigators meeting. The Project Advisory Board will provide an important external source of evaluation. Additionally, a professional external evaluator will be employed to perform ongoing informal and annual formal evaluation of the performance and deliverables from the education team.

Progress 09/01/13 to 08/31/20

Outputs
Target Audience:The Bioenergy Alliance Network of the Rockies (BANR) has been actively engaged in communication with several of our target audiences since the project was officially announced in October 2013, and has undertaken more formal communication and outreach strategies for different audiences as the project has grown. The general public is an important target audience with whom we have engaged since the start of the project. The project web site was launched the day the project was officially announced and the site continues to be kept live, but with a minimal amount of maintenance now that the project has been completed. Our Education team webinar series features numerous webinars on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/user/banrbioenergy) an active presence on Twitter (https://twitter.com/BANR_Bioenergy). In addition to this general engagement, members of our Socio-Economic and Policy Assessment task team interviewed a number of community organizations in the three different BANR case study regions to gauge their awareness of and opinions on active management of forests and wood bioenergy issues. BANR team members have also engaged many other scientists working within the broader NIFA biofuel research program, particularly in other CAPs, via personal contacts (email, telephone, at meetings) to develop collaborations on research, teaching, and outreach activities. Presentations about BANR project objectives and initial research results were given at national meetings, institutional seminars, and local meetings, including the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, Society of American Foresters National Convention, US Biochar Initiative's Biochar 2016 meeting, Council on Forest Engineering Annual Meeting, Colorado Science Conference, Western Forest Economists Annual Meeting, Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) Annual Meeting, and others. BANR also contributed a delegation to the 2016 AFRI Bioenergy Project Directors meeting in New Orleans, LA, presented at the 2017 DOE/BRDI meeting and the Fall 2017 PD meeting in Tampa. We cohosted a national meeting with US Biochar Initiative in July 2019 in Fort Collins, as a forum for synthesis presentations by BANR project teams. A variety of other target audiences were engaged in more specific ways. A subcommittee of the BANR Executive Committee and Project Advisory Board developed a formal engagement strategy for Federal and State land management agencies, particularly the United States Forest Service, as they are a unique stakeholder and major landowner in the region. Likewise, private landowners were engaged through formal presentations to the Montana Forest Owners Association and the Colorado Bark Beetle Cooperative. The BANR management team had numerous contacts with a variety of companies from the bioenergy industry and we continue to field inquiries from industry. The Lifecycle Assessment task team convened a lifecycle assessment stakeholder 'focus group' including members from a variety of target audiences including industry, NGOs, landowners, and land management and regulatory agencies. Finally, teachers and students are the main target audience of the BANR Education task area. A dozen middle and high school teachers across the BANR project region have been working with the BANR Education team on bioenergy curriculum development since the summer of 2014, and teacher engagement was expanded through research experiences for teachers (RET). The project had several graduate student trainees, some of whom have participated in the 'Biomass Technology' and 'Bioenergy Policy, Economics, and Environmental Assessment' graduate course sequence taught at Colorado State University with the participation of several project PIs. Additionally, a graduate course in Lifecycle Assessment was taught at Colorado State University, with support from BANR researchers and has had 10-15 students per semester of course offering. Changes/Problems:Due to personnel changes and a re-focusing of their strategic priorities, our technology partner Cool Planet Energy Systems (CPES) elected to cease formal participation in the BANR project after year 4. They had previous completed the fuel production and testing activities laid out in the original proposal and had carried out biochar production runs and systems evaluation and worked on biochar field testing. The company decided to cease liquid fuel production as part of their product mix and they mothballed the demonstration-scale fuel production facility and stopped development of the industry-scale plant that was to be sited in Louisiana, which meant that some health and safety studies that were planned in conjunction with the commercial biorefinery did not take place. However, CPES personnel were able to contribute the needed system performance metrics to support our TEA and LCA analyses that included pryrolsis conversion to liquid fuel and biochar coproducts. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?In addition to undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate training, the BANR project supported training and professional development at a variety of different levels. Undergraduate students received training in field, lab and other research methods while working with BANR research scientists and graduate students. Graduate students as well as postdocs in the project had the opportunity to participate numerous regional and national workshops and meets to present their results. The Feedstock Supply team mentored a number of undergraduate students participating in the NASA DEVELOP program, who worked to help create stakeholder-relevant products including the mapping of tree mortality from the current spruce beetle outbreak across Colorado and mapping tree species composition in the Colorado State Forest State Park. At the graduate level, the project has funded and helped mentor eight graduate students, including in collaboratively-taught coursework on bioenergy technology, policy, economics, and environmental assessment topics. At the professional level, BANR worked with 12 'lead teachers' and one 'teacher-in-residence' drawn from across the project region on science curriculum development. Extension team members developed logging safety videos and other information products for the forest products industry. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?- Research teams had 21 scientific paper published in peer-reviewed journals during the final year of the project (plus no cost extension period). For the entire project, more than 180 journal publications, conference proceeding and presentations were completed - The Extension team worked with landowners and stakeholders across the 4-state BANR region, sponsored and/or participated in workshops and field days and produced numerous informational publications and videos - Results have been presented by BANR scientists and graduate students across a wide range of approximately three dozen scientific and industry meetings and conferences -The project website introduced lay audiences to the issues covered by the project, and to better disseminate BANR outcomes including published articles, extension materials, curricula for middle and high school teaching units, and videos. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? Nothing Reported

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? Impact The Bioenergy Alliance Network of the Rockies (BANR) assessed the potential for an environmentally sustainable, economically viable and socially acceptable bioenergy industry in the Rocky Mountain region based on beetle-killed trees and other forest biomass, and provide the research, education, training and outreach to support the development of such systems. In many beetle-impacted forest stands, wood removed for forest restoration management and fire hazard reduction is not usable for traditional forest products and is instead burned in piles, resulting in the waste of a potentially valuable feedstock, often incurring significant environmental damages in the process. The BANR project studied this unique biomass resource with a focus on conversion to 'drop-in' liquid transportation fuel blendstocks and biochar valuable coproducts via thermochemical pyrolysis biomass conversion technology. Additional potential uses of beetle kill feedstocks were evaluated in techno-economic analyses for use in grid-scale biomass to electricity generation facilities, small scale heat-and-power facilities as well as diverse bioproduct streams including wood pellets, kitty litter, biosorbents and other products. Other accomplishments included proof of concept production of 10 gallons of beetle-kill pine drop-in biofuel blendstock by industrial partner Cool Planet Energy Systems in their pilot-scale pyrolysis system, application of an integrated supply chain model to the Colorado State Forest Park, and continued progress on sustainability metrics. Project scientists have published more than 170 journal and conference proceeding publications and presented their results at more than 30 scientific conferences. Accomplishments for each of the major tasks include: 1. Quantify and locate existing Feedstock Supply (Task 1) and develop tools for rapid detection and quantification of newly-occurring infestations. The Feedstock Supply team completed biomass atlases for the Medicine Bow (CO/WY) and Nez Perce (ID) case study regions and developed tools for detecting canopy mortality over time, completing a time series of the pine beetle outbreak in the Helena (MT) case study region. The team also mapped spruce beetle tree mortality in southwestern CO. 2. Evaluate Feedstock Logistics and Processing (Task 2) to improve financial viability of harvest, collection, processing, transport and storage of woody biomass feedstock materials. The Feedstock Logistics and Processing team developed cost-minimization harvest logistics models based on data collected during observations of beetle-kill harvest in Colorado, Montana, and Idaho. The team identified the most efficient biomass harvesting and supply chain logistics for the Colorado State Forest Park using the integrated supply chain model they developed with data collected through BANR research. An ESRI ArcGIS add-in tool was developed and released to facilitate both industrial plant siting and biomass feedstock procurement. 3. Assess System Performance and Sustainability (Task 3). The Environmental Impacts team completed collecting and analysis field data to inform understanding of the effects of biomass removal and retention on ecosystem structure and function, as well as modeling of forest stand development and fire behavior with FVS and FVS-FFE models. Results from field data collection and analyses quantified the impacts of removal vs leaving beetle-killed trees as well as post-harvest treatment of slash on regeneration as well as litter and soil organic matter and soil nitrogen. Several field trials were carried out and results published on the efficacy of biochar applications, both from our project partner Cool Planet Energy Systems (who utilize a proprietary pretreatment) as well as an untreated commercial biochar. Biochar amendment studies included application to field crops, nursery stock and for rehabilitation of highly disturbed soils.CPES empirically determined a mass and energy balance for their pilot-scale continuous pyrolysis system operating on beetle-kill feedstock materials, and used this information to estimate the performance of a commercial scale (10 ton per hour) fuel and biochar plant. The Financial Analysis team conducted and published techno-economic analysis comparing four bioenergy and bioproducts production pathways modeled after actual or planned facilities in the Rocky Mountains. The Socioeconomic team completed ethnographic case studies investigating the dimensions of social acceptance of wood biomass harvesting and utilization for bioenergy. Improvements to the Forest Vegetation Simulator model were made to improve modelling of lodgepole pine following major stand mortality (e.g. beetle kill, fire, harvest) and the model was used to simulate long-term projections of forest growth and carbon dynamics under alternative harvest or no-harvest options. A life cycle analysis of the full system environmental impacts of feedstock utilization, process and alternative use scenarios (including energy, fuel and bioproduct production systems) was completed and is currently being submitted for publication in a peer-reviewed journal. 4. Increasing understanding of forest health and management issues and bioenergy literacy for students at all levels through a targeted Education (Task 4) program. The BANR Education program worked with lead teachers to develop new curricula, refine and test middle and high school bioenergy science units, and coordinated university undergraduate research activities through SUPER (Skills for Undergraduate Participation in Ecological Research, and contributed to a university course on Life Cycle Assessment. 5. Providing useful practical and timely information to communities and stakeholder groups on all aspects of a potential beetle-kill bioenergy industry through Extension and Outreach (Task 5). The Extension and Outreach team developed and disseminated numerous popular articles, videos and webinars, and put on workshops for forest landowners, forest industry professionals, logging associations, other stakeholders and the general public. Further, the team drafted a BANR "Pathways" handbook. 6. Understanding and incorporating the concerns of communities regarding the Health & Safety (Task 6) of biofuel and biochar production and distribution. The Health and Safety team conducted a series of studies and published results regarding safety hazards and operational recommendations for harvest of beetle-kill affected stands.

Publications

  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Ramlow M., E.J. Foster; S.J. Del Grosso and M.F. Cotrufo (2018) The Limited Benefits of Biochar in Limited Irrigation Maize. Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, 269:71-81
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Qin, X., Keefe, R. F., & Daugaard, D. E. (2018). Small Landowner Production of Pellets from Green, Beetle-Killed, and Burned Lodgepole Pine. Energies, 11(3), 648. https://doi.org/10.3390/en11030648
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Loeffler, D., & Anderson, N. 2018. Impacts of the mountain pine beetle on sawmill operations, costs, and product values in Montana. Forest Products Journal. 68(1): 15-24. https://forestprodjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.13073/FPJ-D-17-00041
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Hogland, John; Anderson, Nathaniel; Chung, Woodam. 2018. New geospatial approaches for efficiently mapping forest biomass logistics at high resolution over large areas. ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information 7(4): 156. 19 pp. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi7040156
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Woodward, B.D., Evangelista, P.H., Vorster, A.G. (2018). Mapping progression and severity of a Southern Colorado spruce beetle outbreak using calibrated image composites. Forests 9, 114. https://doi.org/10.3390/f9060336
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Han, H., Chung, W., Wells, L., & Anderson, N. 2018. Optimizing Biomass Feedstock Logistics for Forest Residue Processing and Transportation on a Tree-Shaped Road Network. Forests, 9(3), 121. https://doi.org/10.3390/f9030121
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Han, H., Chung, W., She, J., Anderson, N., & Wells, L. 2018. Productivity and Costs of Two Beetle-Kill Salvage Harvesting Methods in Northern Colorado. Forests, 9(9), 572. https://doi.org/10.3390/f9090572
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Campbell, R., Anderson, N., Daugaard, D., & Naughton, H. (2018). Technoeconomic and Policy Drivers of Project Performance for Bioenergy Alternatives Using Biomass from Beetle-Killed Trees. Energies, 11(2), 293. https://doi.org/10.3390/en11020293
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Campbell, R. M., Anderson, N. M., Daugaard, D. E., & Naughton, H. T. (2018). Financial viability of biofuel and biochar production from forest biomass in the face of market price volatility and uncertainty. Applied Energy, 230, 330343. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2018.08.085
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Campbell, R. M., Venn, T. J., & Anderson, N. M. (2018a). Cost and performance tradeoffs between mail and internet survey modes in a nonmarket valuation study. Journal of Environmental Management, 210, 316327. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2018.01.034
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Campbell, R. M., Venn, T. J., & Anderson, N. M. (2018b). Heterogeneity in Preferences for Woody Biomass Energy in the US Mountain West. Ecological Economics, 145, 2737. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2017.08.018
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Foster, E., Fogel, E.J., Cotrufo M.F. (2018). Sorption to biochar impacts ?-glucosidase and phosphatase enzyme activities. Agriculture 8,158; doi:10.3390/agriculture8100158
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Bode, E., Lawrence, R. L., Powell, S. L., Savage, S. L., Trowbridge, A., M. 2018. A time-series approach for mapping mountain pine beetle infestation extent and severity in the U.S. Central Rocky Mountains. Journal of Applied Remote Sensing 12(4):046030. https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JRS.12.046030
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Becker, Ryer M.; Keefe, Robert F.; Anderson, Nathaniel M.; Eitel, Jan U.H. 2018. Use of Lidar derived Landscape Parameters to Characterize Alternative Harvest System Options in the Inland Northwest. International Journal of Forest Engineering 29(3): 179-191. https://doi.org/10.1080/14942119.2018.1497255
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Armatas, C., R. Campbell, A. Watson, W. Borrie, N. Christensen, and T. Venn. 2018. An integrated approach to valuation and tradeoff analysis of ecosystem services for national forest decision-making. Ecosystem Services 33: 1-18.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2020 Citation: Field J.L., Richard T.L., Smithwick E.A., Cai H., Laser M.S., LeBauer D.S., Long S.P., Paustian K., Qin Z., Sheehan J.J., Smith P., Wang M.Q., Lynd L.R. (2020) Robust paths to net greenhouse gas mitigation and negative emissions via advanced biofuels. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117 (36), 21968-21977. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1920877117
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2019 Citation: Yamina Pressler, Mary Hunter-Laszlo, Sarah Bucko, Beth A. Covitt, Sarah Urban, Christina Benton, Michelle Bartholomew, Amanda J. Morrison, Erika J. Foster, Sylvia D. Parker, M. Francesca Cotrufo, John C. Moore; Teaching Authentic Soil & Plant Science in Middle School Classrooms with a Biochar Case Study. The American Biology Teacher 1 April 2019; 81 (4): 256268. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/abt.2019.81.4.256
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2020 Citation: B.N. Avera, Rhoades, C.C., Calderon, F., and Cotrufo, M.F. 2020. Soil C storage following salvage logging and residue management in bark beetle-infested lodgepole pine forests. Forest Ecology and Management 472: 118251. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2020.118251
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2020 Citation: C. C., Rhoades, Hubbard, R. M., Hood, P. R., Starr, B. J., Tinker, D. B., and Elder, K.. 2020. Snagfall the first decade after severe bark beetle infestation of high?elevation forests in Colorado, USA. Ecological Applications 30( 3):02059. 10.1002/eap.2059
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2020 Citation: Vorster, A.G., Evangelista, P.H., Stovall, A.E.L., and Ex, S. (2020) Variability and uncertainty in forest biomass estimates from the tree to landscape scale: the role of allometric equations. Carbon Balance Manage 15, 8. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13021-020-00143-6
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2021 Citation: Bagdon B.A., Nguyen T.H., Vorster A., Paustian K., Field J.L. (2021) A model evaluation framework applied to the Forest Vegetation Simulator (FVS) in Colorado and Wyoming lodgepole pine forests. Forest Ecology and Management, 480, 118619. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foreco.2020.118619
  • Type: Theses/Dissertations Status: Published Year Published: 2020 Citation: 2014-2020: Bethany Avera (PhD), Graduate Degree Program in Ecology, CSU. Title: FOREST SOIL C AND N RESPONSES TO SALVAGE LOGGING AND BELOWGROUND C INPUTS IN BARK BEETLE INFESTED STANDS
  • Type: Theses/Dissertations Status: Published Year Published: 2019 Citation: 2014-2019: Yamina Pressler (PhD), Graduate Degree Program in Ecology, CSU. Title: FIRE DISTURBANCE BELOWGROUND: UNTANGLING CONSEQUENCES FOR SOIL FOOD WEBS AND ORGANIC MATTER
  • Type: Theses/Dissertations Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: 2014-2018: Matt Ramlow (PhD), Graduate Degree Program in Ecology, CSU. Title: EVALUATING SOIL PRODUCTIVITY AND CLIMATE CHANGE BENEFITS OF WOODY BIOCHAR SOIL AMENDMENTS FOR THE US INTERIOR WEST
  • Type: Theses/Dissertations Status: Published Year Published: 2020 Citation: 2010-2020: Tony Vorster (PhD), Graduate Degree Program in Ecology, CSU. Title: CHARACTERIZING FOREST BIOMASS AND THE IMPACTS OF BARK BEETLES AND FOREST MANAGEMENT IN THE SOUTHERN ROCKY MOUNTAINS, USA


Progress 09/01/17 to 08/31/18

Outputs
Target Audience:BANR has been actively engaged in communication with several of our target audiences since the project was officially announced in October 2013, and has undertaken more formal communication and outreach strategies for different audiences as the project has grown. BANR is currently in the process of developing an informational video series that will serve as a project legacy product preserving and presenting our activities beyond the end of the no-cost extension period. The current active development effort includes both videos providing a general overview of the mountain pine beetle epidemic and the activities of the BANR project for lay audiences, and videos focusing on more detailed ecological and management issues geared towards local land-owners and other project stakeholders. The general public is an important target audience with whom we have engaged since the start of the project. The project web site (http://banr.nrel.colostate.edu/) was launched the day the project was officially announced, and build-out and improvements have been ongoing. An updated version of the site was launched during the previous reporting period, linking to background information and research questions directly from the home page in order to make the site more useful and accessible to lay users. We also continue to maintain a social media presence. Our Education team webinar series now features 16 webinars uploaded to YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/user/banrbioenergy) which have accumulated more than 900 views to date. BANR has also maintained an active presence on Twitter (https://twitter.com/BANR_Bioenergy) with approximately 600 tweets of project announcements or relevant bioenergy and forestry news out to 500 followers to date. In addition to this general engagement, members of our Socio-Economic and Policy Assessment task team have been interviewing community organizations in the different BANR case study regions to gauge their awareness of and opinions on active management of forests and wood bioenergy issues, and will be following up these initial engagement efforts with formal survey instruments as the project progresses. BANR team members have also engaged many other scientists working within the broader NIFA biofuel research program, particularly in other CAPs, via personal contacts (email, telephone, at meetings) to develop collaborations on research, teaching, and outreach activities. Presentations about BANR project objectives and initial research results have been given at national meetings, institutional seminars, and local meetings, including meeting of the American Geophysical Union, Society of American Foresters, US Biochar Initiative, Council on Forest Engineering, Colorado Science Conference, Western Forest Economists, Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA), American Center for Lifecycle Assessment and others. BANR has also contributed substantial delegations to all AFRI Bioenergy Project Directors meetings to date. A variety of other target audiences have been engaged in more specific ways over the course of the project. Examples include: Land managers US Forest Service Colorado State Forest Service, and other state-level forest agencies Montana Forest Owners Association Colorado Bark Beetle Cooperative Industry a variety of regional biochar companies and bioenergy conversion technology companies participation in Advanced Bioeconomy Leadership Conference (ABLC) Lifecycle assessment stakeholder 'focus group' industry NGOs landowners land management and regulatory agencies Education field research experiences for teachers (RET) graduate student trainees undergraduate and graduate LCA course development Changes/Problems:Due to personnel changes and a re-focusing of their strategic business priorities, technology partner Cool Planet Energy Systems (CPES) has elected to cease formal participation in the BANR project. CPES had previously completed the fuel production and testing activities specified in the original proposal at significantly less cost than originally planned, as well as dedicated biochar production and evaluation and a variety of smaller tasks related to characterizing related potential feedstocks (e.g., wood salvaged from fire-affected stands). Rather than continue with novel biochar testing activities, CPES will take on a less formal advisory role, and their surplus funding has been re-allocated to provide additional support to graduate students and post-doctoral researchers within the project. We have specifically prioritized the techno-economic assessment (TEA) and lifecycle assessment (LCA) teams doing conversion technology-focused work, and those performing synthesis activites supporting development of a web-based decision support system, as these tasks are most closely related to CPES' original portfolio and of greatest relevance to them and other industrial stakeholders. We continue to represent CPES technology in ongoing LCA and TEA analyses (e.g., https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306261918312558), and we maintain active collaboration with BANR Project Affiliate Confluence Energy (https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/2/293) and more informal collaboration with other local bioenergy companies as highlighted in a recent TEA publication (https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/11/2/293). We continue to search for an appropriate venue to demonstrate use of ~10 gallons of fuel blendstock produced in CPES' pilot-scale pyrolysis system from beetle-kill biomass feedstock sourced from Confluence Energy operations in north central Colorado. We had previously envisioned blending this fuel 10:1 with conventional gasoline and performing a passenger vehicle demonstration at a local conference, extension event, or national USDA meeting, though we have struggled to identify an appropriate and logistically-feasible target. We currently plan to demonstrate the use of this fuel during the USBI-BANR 2019 meeting being planned for next July, assuming fuel quality can be maintained for that long in storage. Finally, we have stopped development of the 'Pathways' booklet described in the previous progress update in favor of a public-oriented annual report document. The Pathways booklet was designed to focus on project outcomes and impacts for the benefit of a relatively narrow readership of agency personnel. The public-facing report is being designed to reach a wider academic, industrial, and stakeholder audience, providing a broader overview of the motivations, methods, and findings of the various BANR task teams. We are currently in the process of outlining report structure and sourcing content from BANR team members. We anticipate the release of this report this fall, followed by an updated version at the end of the project next fall which will serve as a legacy document. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?In addition to undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate training, the BANR project is supporting training and professional development at a variety of different levels. Undergraduate students have received training in field, lab and other research methods while working with BANR research scientists and graduate students. The Feedstock Supply team continues to mentor undergraduate students participating in the NASA DEVELOP program in the creation of BANR- and stakeholder-relevant products including the mapping of tree mortality from the current spruce beetle outbreak across Colorado and mapping tree species composition in the Colorado State Forest State Park. At the graduate level, the project has funded and helped mentor six graduate students, including collaboratively-taught coursework on bioenergy technology, policy, economics, and environmental assessment topics. Graduate students have also had the opportunity through BANR to present research at scientific conferences. At the professional level, BANR is working with 12 'lead teachers' and one 'teacher-in-residence' drawn from across the project region on science curriculum development. Extension team members developed logging safety videos and other information products for the forest products industry. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Outcomes from BANR research, education and extension have been distributed in a number of ways: Research teams have published over 30 scientific manuscripts in peer-reviewed journals to date, with another 9 currently in review The Extension team is continually working with landowners and stakeholders across the region, as well as producing an informational video series with different videos tailored to both landowners and more general audiences. The Health and Safety team is developing a safety app to be released this year to characterize 'Slip, Trip and Fall' risk due to downed trees and overhead hazards in beetle-kill forests for foresters, firefighters, and land owners Results have been presented by BANR scientists and graduate students across a wide range of approximately two dozen scientific and industry meetings and conferences A revised BANR website (http://banr.nrel.colostate.edu/) was launched during the previous reporting period. In addition to some structural changes to make the site more robust and easier to update, the homepage was extensively revised to be more inviting to non-subject-area experts. Specifically, we added a photo-deck that links to background information pages ('The mountain pine beetle epidemic', 'What is biochar?', etc.) that provide motivations and context for our project, and a series of research questions that link back to individual research task pages and highlight how they are interrelated. We continue to maintain an active Twitter presence, tweeting about project news and relevant general news. Our twitter feed is embedded on the homepage of the revised BANR website, along with prominent links to other project social media. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?A variety of activities are planned for the no-cost extension period in order to bring the project to a successful conclusion: co-hosting of a science and technology conference with the US Biochar Initiative (USBI) in July 2019 (current working theme - "From Biomass to Biochar & Bioenergy: Science and Opportunities") demonstration of CPES biofuel blendstock (created from Confluence Energy-sourced local feedstock) in a passenger vehicle publication of a public-facing BANR report that summarizes the motivations, methods, and findings of all BANR task teams for wide audiences release of a BANR video series, including both general informational videos designed for lay audiences and more specific videos on ecology and land management for landowners and project stakeholders hosting of a bi-weekly graduate student and post-doc working webconference to facilitate the timely completion of ongoing analyses and promote additional cross-task synthesis activities wherever possible testing of a novel biomass grinding system configuration with BANR Project Affiliate Confluence Energy continued evaluation of biochar performance in a high-value agricultural production system (peach orchards in western Colorado) completion of FVS model re-calibration, and associated temporally- and spatially-explicit LCA studies expansion of the technoeconomic assessment study to include previously-estimated non-market valuations for the potential impacts of more widespread beetle-kill stand treatment on wildfire risk and local air quality collaboration with the Aviation Sustainability Center (ASCENT, https://ascent.aero/) to expand their previously-published biorefinery site selection analysis (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0961953416303956) to the BANR project region launch on-line tools for assessing biofuel feedstock sustainability formal classroom evaluation of BANR-developed middle and high school science units development of college courses on lifecycle assessment, including a traditional undergraduate course and a graduate-level online course

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? Impact The Bioenergy Alliance Network of the Rockies (BANR) is assessing the potential for an environmentally sustainable, economically viable, and socially acceptable bioenergy industry in the Rocky Mountain region based on beetle-killed trees and other forest biomass, and providing the research, education, training, and outreach to support the development of such systems. In many beetle-impacted forest stands, wood removed for forest restoration management and fire hazard reduction is not usable for traditional forest products and is instead burned in piles, resulting in the waste of a potentially valuable feedstock. The BANR project is comprehensively studying this unique biomass resource with a focus on conversion to 'drop-in' liquid transportation fuel blendstocks, biochar, and other valuable co-products via novel, scalable thermochemical biomass conversion technologies. The BANR team met a number of project goals in Year 5, including completion of biomass atlases for all 3 BANR case study regions, launch of a re-designed project website, and public announcement of an end-of-project capstone science meeting to be hosted in conjunction with the US Biochar Initiative (USBI). Project scientists disseminated their work through the publication of 12 new journal manuscripts (>30 peer-reviewed publications for the project to date, with a further 9 submitted and in review) and presentations at approximately 15 scientific conferences during this period. BANR publications listed in the previous reporting periods continue to enjoy wide readership, including an article on processing LANDSAT satellite imagery that was the most downloaded in the journal Ecology in 2017. Accomplishments to date for each of the major tasks: 1. Quantify and locate existing Feedstock Supply (Task 1) and develop tools for rapid detection and quantification of newly-occurring infestations. The Feedstock Supply team completed biomass atlases for all three case study regions, and applied outbreak severity detection methods to derive beetle-kill biomass for the Medicine Bow (CO/WY) and Nez Perce (ID) case study regions. The team is currently working with NASA Develop to identify lodgepole pine forests in the BANR region susceptible to future pine beetle outbreaks. More broadly, this group has developed and published methods for using LIDAR for non-destructive high-speed sampling of stand biomass, characterizing stand structure and management history via remote sensing products, using satellite imagery to track the recent progression of beetle infestation, and identifying vulnerable to future beetle outbreak. 2. Evaluate Feedstock Logistics and Processing (Task 2) to improve financial viability of harvest, collection, processing, transport and storage of woody biomass feedstock materials The Feedstock Logistics and Processing team developed new cost and productivity models, and found novel engineering solutions to improve cost efficiency of harvest operations. Within these models they were able to quantify the cost, productivity and value effects of delayed harvest in beetle-killed stands. More broadly, this group has developed and published methods for comparing a variety of alternate harvest systems (whole-tree versus lop-and-scatter; adoption of slash yarding; helicopter versus cable logging on steep slopes), use of GPS-style equipment position monitoring for improved operational efficiency and safety, and more effective integration of remote sensing data into forest operations planning. 3. Assess System Performance and Sustainability (Task 3) with regard to: Environmental Impacts (Task 3.1) of different beetle-killed tree harvesting techniques in dominant forest types throughout the study region The effectiveness of Biochar (Task 3.2) as a soil amendment and its potential to improve the greenhouse gas balance of the biofuel system The economic and social practicality of harvest and biofuel production through Conversion Modeling (Task 3.3), Financial Analysis (Task 3.5), and Socioeconomic & Policy Analysis (Task 3.6) The greenhouse gas mitigation potential and other environmental impacts of the full wood-based biofuel supply chain using Lifecycle Assessment (Task 3.4) The intersection of supply availability, harvest logistical capability, and any other economic, environmental, or social constraints on harvest and conversion within a spatially-explicit web-based Decision Support System (Task3.7) The Environmental Impacts team has produced initial results on the effects of harvest treatments on basal area recovery, fuel accumulations and tree regenerations with FVS and FVS-FFE models. The team has also assessed the impacts of salvage logging of soil organic matter through field measurement of paired forest treatments. All biochar field experiments, with the exception of peach trials, were completed in Year 5. The Biochar team is also evaluating results from new corn trials with Cool Planet Energy Systems (CPES) on their commercially-available biochar product, Cool Terra. Building on their previous analysis comparing the financial feasibility of four bioenergy and bioproducts production pathways, the Financial Analysis team conducted a more detailed techno-economic analysis contrasting a new CPES hearth system for dedicated biochar production with their original pyrolysis system co-producing biofuel blendstock and biochar. The Socioeconomic team conducted additional interviews to complete the ethnographic case studies investigating the dimensions of social acceptance of wood biomass harvesting and utilization for bioenergy. The team is also assessing data on U.S. Forest Service implementation costs for the NEPA process and how that impacts forest restoration projects on USFS lands. The Life Cycle Assessment team has produced a lodgepole pine stand development dataset based on USFS Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) data, and is in the final process of re-calibrating the Forest Vegetation Simulator to more accurately reflect productivity and stand structure in our Medicine Bow case study region. The resulting calibrated model simulations will feed directly in to an existing structure for the assessment of the temporally-explicit climate impacts of the CPES biofuel/biochar production system, and will enable spatially-explicit modeling of the carbon deficit of harvest as one component of a web-based decision support system (DSS). 4. Increasing understanding of forest health and management issues and bioenergy literacy for students at all levels through a targeted Education (Task 4) program In Year 5, the BANR Education team is finalizing Next Generation Science Standards-aligned frameworks in forest ecology, biochar and biofuels, along with associated instructional materials (lesson plans, data nuggets, etc.) and posting them to the BANR website for download by educators. 5. Providing useful practical and timely information to communities and stakeholder groups on all aspects of a potential beetle-kill bioenergy industry through Extension and Outreach (Task 5) In year 5, the Extension and Outreach team developed and disseminated popular articles, videos and webinars, and put on workshops for forest landowners, forest industry professionals, logging associations, other stakeholders and the general public. Work is underway on a new set of videos highlighting BANR research outcomes to both lay audiences and local landowners and other project stakeholders. 6. Understanding and incorporating the concerns of communities regarding the Health & Safety (Task 6) of biofuel and biochar production and distribution In Year 5, the team focused heavily on quantifying within forest hazards in beetle-kill stands related to 'Slip, Trip and Fall' risks from forest floor debris and overhead hazards from falling trees and branches. These safety assessments are being deployed in a new mobile app for foresters, loggers and wildland firefighters.

Publications

  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Becker, R. and R.F. Keefe. 2017. Use of LiDAR and simulation modeling to characterize alternative steep slope harvest system options in the Inland Northwest. Society of American Foresters National Convention, Albuquerque, NM. November 15-19, 2017.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Bode, E., and R.L. Lawrence. 2017. Clash of the Variables. Bioenergy Alliance Network of the Rockies Annual Meeting. October 12, 2017, Fort Collins, CO.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Bode, E.T., and Lawrence, R.L. 2018. Spatiotemporal Pattern Analysis of Mountain Pine Beetle Outbreak in the Southern Northern Rocky Mountains of Colorado, Ecological Society of America, August 2018, New Orleans, LA.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Chung, W., H. Han, and N. Anderson. 2017. Beetle-killed biomass for bioenergy: An integrated modeling approach for feedstock supply and logistics. Presented at the IUFRO 125th Anniversary Congress, September 18-22, 2017, Freiburg, Germany
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Durbin T. 2018. "Big lies and dangerous middles: using ethnographic listening to understand forest worker safety." Marshfield Clinic Research Institute Scientific Seminar Series, Marshfield, WI. 25 April 2018
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Strauss, S. 2017. Anthropology Matters in Extension. Invited Discussant, Roundtable. Organizer: Andrew Tarter. Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. 28 Nov-3 Dec 2017, Washington, DC
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Jarod Dunn. 2018. Econometric Model of National Environmental Policy Act Timber Projects, presented at the 4th International Conference on Environmental and Economic Impact on Sustainable Development, June 20-22, 2018, Naples, Italy.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Jarod Dunn. 2018. NEPA project costs and ESA impacts, presented at the Western Forest Economists 53rd Annual Meeting, June 3-5, 2018, Olympia, WA. http://www.westernforesteconomists.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Dunn_WForestEcon2018Presentation.pdf
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Jensen-Ryan D. 2018. Wood-based Bioenergy Development in the American West: An Ethnographic Political Analysis. Panelist and Co-organizer for Panel on Sustainable Futures? Renewable Resources and Energy Transitions. Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, Philadelphia, PA, 2-6 April 2018.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Morrison A. and M. Hunter-Laszlo. 2017. Developing Models and Writing Scientific Explanations. Colorado Science Conference, Denver, CO.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Morrison A. and M. Hunter-Laszlo. 2017. Using Large Data Sets in the Classroom. Colorado Science Conference, Denver, CO.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Ramlow M. and Foster E.J. 2017. The limited benefits of biochar for Colorado agriculture. Oral presentation at the Eastern Colorado Crop Production Conference, Sterling, CO, December 2017.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Ramlow M. and Foster E.J., Del Grosso S., Cotrufo M.F. 2017. The limited benefits of biochar in limited irrigation. Oral presentation at the ASA, CCSA and SSSA 2017 Annual Meeting, Tampa, FL, November, 2017.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Sarauer, J.L., and M.D. Coleman. 2017. Biochar and Douglas-fir seedling growth and quality. Intermountain Container Seedling Growers Association Annual Meeting, Moscow, ID, September 2017.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Sarauer, J. L., and M.D. Coleman. 2018. Microbial Community Diversity in Biochar Amended Forest Soils in the Pacific Northwest, USA. 13th North American Forest Soils Conference Quebec, Canada, June 10-16, 2018
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Vorster A., P. Evangelista, and A. Stovall. 2017. Biomass Estimate Variability between Allometric Equations from Tree to Landscape Scale. Society of American Foresters Annual Convention. November 16, 2017, Albuquerque, NM.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: She, J., H. Han, and W. Chung. 2017. Multi-objective optimization of timber and bioenergy supply chain from beetle-killed biomass in Colorado. Presented at the 50th International Symposium on Forestry Mechanization, September 25-29, 2017, Brasov, Romania.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Strauss, S. 2018. Discussant and Co-Organizer, Panel on Sustainable Futures? Renewable Resources and Energy Transitions. Annual Meeting of the Society for Applied Anthropology, Philadelphia, PA, 2-6 April 2018.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Urban, S., L. Mannix, B. Covitt, and A. Podrasky. 2017. Connecting Ecology, Biofuels, and Carbon-Cycling With the Pine Beetle Epidemic. Conference of the Montana Education Association, Missoula, MT.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Vorster, A.G. Evangelista, P.H. 2018. Remote Sensing Applications in Ecology. Invited lecture for Colorado State University NR493, March 5, 2018, Fort Collins, CO.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Woodward, B.D. and P.H. Evangelista. 2017. Mapping progression and severity of a Southern Colorado spruce beetle epidemic in a cloudy study area. Society of American Foresters Annual Convention. November 16, 2017, Albuquerque, NM.
  • Type: Theses/Dissertations Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Bode, E.T. 2018. Spatiotemporal mapping of mountain pine beetle infestation severity and probability of new infestation in the central U.S. Rocky Mountains. Masters Thesis, Montana State University
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Strauss, S. 2017. Fire Otherwise. Roundtable Participant. Organizer: Cynthia Fowler. Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. 28 Nov-3 Dec 2017, Washington, D.C.
  • Type: Websites Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Vorster, A.G. 2018. Is forest bioenergy really a climate change solution? Blog post for EcoPress (https://www.nrel.colostate.edu/is-forest-bioenergy-really-a-climate-change-solution/) and Human Nature (http://blog.sustainability.colostate.edu/?q=vorster)
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Armatas, C., R. Campbell, A. Watson, W. Borrie, N. Christensen, and T. Venn. 2018. An integrated approach to valuation and tradeoff analysis of ecosystem services for national forest decision-making. Ecosystem Services 33: 1-18.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Campbell, R., N. Anderson, D. Daugaard, and H. Naughton. 2018. Technoeconomic and policy drivers of project performance for bioenergy alternatives using biomass from beetle-killed trees. Energies 11(2): 293.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Qin, X., R.F. Keefe, and D.E. Daugaard. 2018. Small landowner production of pellets from green, beetle-killed and burned lodgepole pine. Energies 11: 648; doi:10.3390/en11030648
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Clement, J., T. Cheng, N. Anderson and P. Motley. 2017. Examining the social acceptability of forest biomass harvesting and utilization from collaborative forest landscape restoration: a case study from Western Colorado, USA. Journal of Forestry 115(6): 530-539.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Han, H., W. Chung, L. Wells, and N. Anderson. 2018. Optimizing Biomass Feedstock Logistics for Forest Residue Processing and Transportation on a Tree-shaped Road Network. Forests 9(3): 121.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Hogland, H., N. Anderson, and W. Chung. 2018. New Geospatial Approaches for Efficiently Mapping Forest Biomass Logistics at High Resolution over Large Areas. ISPRS (International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing) International Journal of Geo-Information 7(4): 156.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Ramlow M. and M.F. Cotrufo. 2018. Woody biochar's greenhouse gas mitigation potential across fertilized and unfertilized agricultural soils and soil moisture regimes. GCB Bioenergy 10: 108-122.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Ramlow M., C.C. Rhoades, and M.F. Cotrufo. 2018. Promoting revegetation and soil carbon sequestration on decommissioned forest roads Colorado, USA: A comparative assessment of organic soil amendments. Forest Ecology and Management 247: 230-241.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Sarauer, J. L. and M. D. Coleman. 2018. Biochar as a growing media component for containerized production of Douglas-fir. Canadian Journal of Forest Research 48(5): 581-588. doi:10.1139/cjfr-2017-0415
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Woodward, B., P. Engelstad, A. Vorster, C. Beddow, S. Krail, A. Vashisht, and P. Evangelista. 2017. Forest harvest dataset for northern Colorado Rocky Mountains (19842015) generated from a Landsat time series and existing forest harvest records. Data in Brief 15: 724727. doi:10.1016/j.dib.2017.10.030
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Woodward, B.D., P.H. Evangelista, and A.G. Vorster. 2018. Mapping Progression and Severity of a Southern Colorado Spruce Beetle Outbreak Using Calibrated Image Composites. Forests 9(6): 336. doi:10.3390/f9060336
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Accepted Year Published: 2018 Citation: Becker, R., R. Keefe, N. Anderson, and J. Eitel. 2018. Use of lidar-derived landscape parameters to characterize alternative harvest system options in the Inland Northwest. International Journal of Forest Engineering.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Accepted Year Published: 2018 Citation: Becker, R., R.F. Keefe, J.U.H. Eitel, and N.M. Anderson. 2018. Use of lidar-derived landscape parameters to characterize alternative harvest system options in the Inland Northwest. Accepted: International Journal of Forest Engineering
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Accepted Year Published: 2018 Citation: Loeffler, D. and N. Anderson. 2018. Operational and cost impacts of the mountain pine beetle on sawmills in Montana. Forest Products Journal.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Submitted Year Published: 2018 Citation: Durbin T., D. Jensen-Ryan, S. Strauss, T.A. Beeton, K.A. Galvin, and R. Budowle. Clearings in the Forest of Blame: Utilizing Explanatory Models to Understand Cultural Perceptions of Beetle Kill in the Mountain West. Journal of Forestry.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Submitted Year Published: 2018 Citation: Ramlow M., E. Foster, S. Del Grosso, and M.F. Cotrufo. Broadcast woody biochar provides limited benefits to deficit irrigation maize in Colorado. Agriculture Ecosystems and the Environment.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Submitted Year Published: 2018 Citation: Sarauer, J. L., and M. D. Coleman. Douglas-fir seedling quality in biochar-amended peat substrates. Reforesta
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Submitted Year Published: 2018 Citation: Sarauer, J. L., D.S. Page-Dumroese, and M. D. Coleman. Soil greenhouse gas, carbon content, and tree growth response to biochar amendment in western United States forests. GCB-Bioenergy
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Anderson, N. 2018. Biochar in the Forest Sector Supply Chain. International Biochar Initiative (IBI), online webinar: Forest Management and Biochar. February, 1, 2018, https://www.biochar-international.org/webinars-list/
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Anderson, N., J. Hogland, and W. Chung. 2017. New methods to estimate, analyze and map forest characteristics, wood quality and resources over large landscapes at high resolution. Abstract published in the Book of Abstracts of the IUFRO 125th Anniversary Congress, September 18-22, 2017, Freiburg, Germany
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Han, H., W. Chung, and N. Anderson. 2017. Beetle-killed biomass for bioenergy: An integrated modeling approach for feedstock supply and logistics. Abstract published in the Book of Abstracts of the IUFRO 125th Anniversary Congress, September 18-22, 2017, Freiburg, Germany
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: She, J., H. Han, and W. Chung. 2017. Multi-objective optimization of timber and bioenergy supply chain from beetle-killed biomass in Colorado. Abstract published in Proceedings of FORMEC 2017, September 25-29, 2017, Brasov, Romania.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Submitted Year Published: 2018 Citation: Campbell, R., N. Anderson, D. Daugaard, and H. Naughton. The effect of price on the financial performance of biofuel and biochar production enterprises using forest biomass feedstock. Submitted to Applied Energy.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Anderson, N. 2018. Trends in Forest Industry Economics. Four-hour public workshop in coordination with the Salmon-Challis National Forest, June 29, 2018, Salmon, ID.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Submitted Year Published: 2018 Citation: Durbin T., C.G. Bendixsen, D. Jensen-Ryan, A. Molzer, and S. Strauss. The dangerous middle: situational awareness and worker perception of beetle kill. Journal of Agromedicine.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Anderson, N. 2018. Trends in Forest Industry Economics. Four-hour public workshop in coordination with the Salmon-Challis National Forest, June 29, 2018, Challlis, ID.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Anderson, N., J. Hogland, and W. Chung. 2017. New methods to estimate, analyze and map forest characteristics, wood quality and resources over large landscapes at high resolution. Presented at the IUFRO 125th Anniversary Congress, September 18-22, 2017, Freiburg, Germany.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Avera, B., C. Rhoades, F. Calderon, and M.F. Cotrufo. 2018. "Salvage logging bark-beetle infested forests increases soil organic matter stocks." Oral Presentation. Front Range Student Ecology Symposium. Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO. 13 Feb 2018
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Avera, B., C. Rhoades, F. Calderon, and M.F. Cotrufo. 2018. "Soil organic matter stocks and formation pathways in bark-beetle infested lodgepole pine: Implications for salvage logging and residue management." Poster Presentation. North American Forest Soils Conference. Quebec City, Quebec, Can. 11-14 June 2018
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2018 Citation: Avera, B., C. Rhoades, E. Paul, and M.F. Cotrufo. 2018. "Ecosystem nitrogen retention following bark beetle and salvage logging in lodgepole pine forests: a 15N enrichment study." Poster Presentation. AGU Fall Meeting New Orleans, LA. 11-15 Dec. 2017


Progress 09/01/16 to 08/31/17

Outputs
Target Audience:BANR has been actively engaged in communication with several of our target audiences since the project was officially announced in October 2013, and has undertaken more formal communication and outreach strategies for different audiences as the project has grown. The general public is an important target audience with whom we have engaged since the start of the project. The project web site was launched the day the project was officially announced, and build-out and improvements have been ongoing. An updated version of the site will be posted in August 2017 and includes a significant increase in information and resources for the public. Our Education team webinar series now features 16 webinars uploaded to YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/user/banrbioenergy) which have accumulated more than 700 views to date. BANR has also maintained an active presence on Twitter (https://twitter.com/BANR_Bioenergy) with over 400 followers to date. In addition to this general engagement, members of our Socio-Economic and Policy Assessment task team have been interviewing community organizations in the different BANR case study regions to gauge their awareness of and opinions on active management of forests and wood bioenergy issues, and will be following up these initial engagement efforts with formal survey instruments as the project progresses. BANR team members have also engaged many other scientists working within the broader NIFA biofuel research program, particularly in other CAPs, via personal contacts (email, telephone, at meetings) to develop collaborations on research, teaching, and outreach activities. Presentations about BANR project objectives and initial research results have been given at national meetings, institutional seminars, and local meetings, including the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, Society of American Foresters National Convention, US Biochar Initiative's Biochar 2016 meeting, Council on Forest Engineering Annual Meeting, Colorado Science Conference, Western Forest Economists Annual Meeting, Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA) Annual Meeting, and others. BANR also contributed a delegation to the 2016 AFRI Bioenergy Project Directors meeting in New Orleans, LA. A variety of other target audiences have been engaged in more specific ways. A subcommittee of the BANR Executive Committee and Project Advisory Board is in the process of developing a formal engagement strategy for Federal and State land management agencies, particularly the United States Forest Service, as they are a unique stakeholder and major landowner in the region. Likewise, private landowners have also been engaged through formal presentations to the Montana Forest Owners Association and the Colorado Bark Beetle Cooperative. The BANR management team has had contact with a variety of companies from the bioenergy industry, and has formed a new affiliation with Confluence Energy (Kremmling, CO). The Lifecycle Assessment task team convened a lifecycle assessment stakeholder 'focus group' from which we solicited feedback on scope, methods, and impact metrics at the end of summer 2015. This group included members from a variety of target audiences including industry, NGOs, landowners, and land management and regulatory agencies. Finally, teachers and students are the main target audience of the BANR Education task area. A dozen middle and high school teachers across the BANR project region have been working with the BANR Education team on bioenergy curriculum development since the summer of 2014, and teacher engagement is expanding through research experiences for teachers (RET). The project now has a full complement of graduate student trainees, most of whom have participated in the 'Biomass Technology' and 'Bioenergy Policy, Economics, and Environmental Assessment' graduate course sequence taught at Colorado State University with the participation of several project PIs. Additionally, a graduate course in Lifecycle Assessment was taught at Colorado State University, with support from BANR researchers, and development of a similar undergraduate course is underway. Changes/Problems:The production, upgrading, and field evaluation of 20 m3 biochar from beetle-kill wood is a new addition to our project work plan. The BANR project previously facilitated the production of 10 gallons of drop-in liquid fuel in CPES' pilot-scale pyrolysis system, using beetle-kill feedstock sourced by Confluence Energy in Colorado. That previous CPES-Confluence collaboration was very successful, and was completed somewhat more cost-effectively and efficiently than originally anticipated. Using this previous work as a template, CPES will use their remaining project resources to test a separate dedicated biochar production system at scale, which is of great interest to the industry while oil prices remain low and fuel production uneconomical. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?In addition to undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate training, the BANR project is supporting training and professional development at a variety of different levels. Undergraduate students have received training in field, lab and other research methods while working with BANR research scientists and graduate students. The Feedstock Supply team continues to mentor undergraduate students participating in the NASA Digital Earth Virtual Environment and Learning Outreach Project (DEVELOP) program in the creation of BANR- and stakeholder-relevant products including the mapping of tree mortality from the current spruce beetle outbreak across Colorado and mapping tree species composition in the Colorado State Forest State Park. At the graduate level, the project has funded and helped mentor six graduate students, including collaboratively-taught coursework on bioenergy technology, policy, economics, and environmental assessment topics. Graduate students have also had the opportunity through BANR to present research at scientific conferences. At the professional level, BANR is working with 12 'lead teachers' and one 'teacher-in-residence' drawn from across the project region on science curriculum development. Extension team members developed logging safety videos and other information products for the forest products industry. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest? Research teams submitted approximately 30 scientific manuscripts for publication in peer-reviewed journals during project year 4 The Extension team is continually working with landowners and stakeholders across the region, as well as producing informational publications and videos Results have been presented by BANR scientists and graduate students across a wide range of approximately two dozen scientific and industry meetings and conferences A revised website will be posted in July 2017 to introduce lay audiences to the issues covered by the project, and to better disseminate BANR outcomes including published articles, extension materials, middle and high school teaching units, and videos. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?Year 5 is the final year of the project, so several outputs are planned: launch of BANR 'capstone' public outputs (fuel demonstration, open science meeting or symposium, new website, 'Pathways' booklet) completion of feedstock atlas for the final BANR Case Study Region (Garnett Range, MT) development of a revenue model that can analyze the effect of delays in beetle kill salvage harvest on recoverable values (based on empirical CSFS data) publication on logistics and feedstock characteristics of smallholder pellet production publication on whole-tree vs. lop-and-scatter effects on forest regeneration and fuels content reporting of preliminary results from new biochar experimental systems (testing the CPES Cool Terra commercial biochar product in corn and tree nursery systems) launch on-line tools for assessing biofuel feedstock sustainability production, upgrading, and field evaluation of 20 m3 biochar from beetle-kill wood led by BANR industrial partners Cool Planet Energy Systems, and Confluence Energy (feedstock sourcing) publication of technoeconomic assessment case study results comparing the expected economics of fuel, electricity, heat, and biochar production formal classroom evaluation of BANR-developed middle and high school science units development of college courses on lifecycle assessment, including a traditional undergraduate course and a graduate-level online course

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? Impact The Bioenergy Alliance Network of the Rockies (BANR) will assess the potential for an environmentally sustainable, economically viable and socially acceptable bioenergy industry in the Rocky Mountain region based on beetle-killed trees and other forest biomass, and provide the research, education, training and outreach to support the development of such systems. In many beetle-impacted forest stands, wood removed for forest restoration management and fire hazard reduction is not usable for traditional forest products and is instead burned in piles, resulting in the waste of a potentially valuable feedstock, often incurring significant environmental damages in the process. The BANR project will comprehensively study this unique biomass resource with a focus on conversion to 'drop-in' liquid transportation fuel blendstocks and valuable coproducts via a novel, scalable thermochemical biomass conversion technology. The BANR team met a number of project goals in Year 4, including completion of biomass atlases for the Medicine Bow and Nez Perce BANR case study regions, production of 10 gallons of raw beetle-kill pine biofuel blendstock by industrial partner Cool Planet Energy Systems in their pilot-scale pyrolysis system, application of an integrated supply chain model to the Colorado State Forest Park, and continued progress on sustainability metrics. Project scientists submitted approximately 30 journal manuscripts for publication, and presented their results at approximately two dozen scientific conferences. Accomplishments to date for each of the major task: 1. Quantify and locate existing Feedstock Supply (Task 1) and develop tools for rapid detection and quantification of newly-occurring infestations. The Feedstock Supply team completed biomass atlases for the Medicine Bow (CO/WY) and Nez Perce (ID) case study regions and continued work on detecting canopy mortality over time, completing a time series of the pine beetle outbreak in the Helena (MT) case study region. The team has also mapped spruce beetle tree mortality in southwestern CO for 2011 and 2015. 2. Evaluate Feedstock Logistics and Processing (Task 2) to improve financial viability of harvest, collection, processing, transport and storage of woody biomass feedstock materials The Feedstock Logistics and Processing team developed cost-minimization harvest logistics models based on data collected during observations of beetle-kill harvest in Colorado, Montana, and Idaho. The team identified the most efficient biomass harvesting and supply chain logistics for the Colorado State Forest State Park using the integrated supply chain model they developed with data collected through BANR research. An ESRI ArcGIS add-in tool was developed and released to facilitate both industrial plant siting and biomass feedstock procurement. 3. Assess System Performance and Sustainability (Task 3) with regard to: - Environmental Impacts (Task 3.1) of different beetle-killed tree harvesting techniques in dominant forest types throughout the study region - The effectiveness of Biochar (Task 3.2) as a soil amendment and its potential to improve the greenhouse gas balance of the biofuel system - The economic and social practicality of harvest and biofuel production through Conversion Modeling (Task 3.3), Financial Analysis (Task 3.5), and Socioeconomic & Policy Analysis (Task 3.6) - The greenhouse gas mitigation potential and other environmental impacts of the full wood-based biofuel supply chain using Lifecycle Assessment (Task 3.4) - The intersection of supply availability, harvest logistical capability, and any other economic, environmental, or social constraints on harvest and conversion within a spatially-explicit web-based Decision Support System (Task3.7) The Environmental Impacts team has continued collecting and analyzing field data to inform understanding of the effects of biomass removal and retention on ecosystem structure and function, as well as modeling of forest stand development and fire behavior with the Forest Vegetation Simulator and FVS-FFE models. Monitoring of field experiments on the effects of biochar amendments are ongoing, and include the implementation of a new greenhouse study on the effects of biochar on tree nurseries. The Biochar team is also collaborating with Cool Planet Energy Systems (CPES) to evaluate their commercially-available biochar product, Cool Terra, in independent scientifically-rigorous field trials. CPES empirically determined a mass and energy balance for their pilot-scale continuous pyrolysis system operating on beetle-kill feedstock materials, and used this information to estimate the performance of a commercial scale (10 ton per hour) fuel and biochar plant. In Year 4, the Financial Analysis team began work on a techno-economic analysis comparing four bioenergy and bioproducts production pathways modeled after actual or planned facilities in the Rocky Mountains. The Socioeconomic team completed ethnographic case studies investigating the dimensions of social acceptance of wood biomass harvesting and utilization for bioenergy. The team is also evaluating factors affecting U.S. Forest Service production costs and wood biomass volume outputs to determine potential for federal forest lands to contribute to a wood-based bioenergy industry. The Lifecycle Assessment team will be finalizing a first-order LCA by the end of 2017. The Decision Support System team is currently developing concepts for the design, which has been informed by participation in the LCA Focus Group and cross-task data integration discussions, particularly with the Harvest Logistics and Socioeconomic teams. 4. Increasing understanding of forest health and management issues and bioenergy literacy for students at all levels through a targeted Education (Task 4) program In Year 4, the BANR Education program worked with lead teachers to further refine and test middle and high school bioenergy science units, coordinated undergraduate research activities through the SUPER (Skills for Undergraduate Participation in Ecological Research) program at the Colorado State University Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory, and began development on an undergraduate course on Life Cycle Assessment similar to the current graduate-level course. 5. Providing useful practical and timely information to communities and stakeholder groups on all aspects of a potential beetle-kill bioenergy industry through Extension and Outreach (Task 5) In year 4, the Extension and Outreach team developed and disseminated popular articles, videos and webinars, and put on workshops for forest landowners, forest industry professionals, logging associations, other stakeholders and the general public. Further, the team has drafted a BANR "Pathways" handbook that will be offered in online and offline formats. 6. Understanding and incorporating the concerns of communities regarding the Health & Safety (Task 6) of biofuel and biochar production and distribution The Health and Safety team completed an on-site visit to the Cool Planet Energy System R&D facility, as well as field research in the three BANR Case Study regions. Initial outcomes from field research have been documented in white papers that will be distributed on the website.

Publications

  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2016 Citation: Anderson, N., and D. Mitchell. 2016. Forest operations and biomass logistics to improve efficiency, value and sustainability. BioEnergy Research, Special Issue on USDA Biomass and Bioenergy Research, 9:518533.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Becker, R., R. Keefe, and N. Anderson. 2017. Use of real-time GNSS-RF data to characterize the swing movements of forestry equipment. Forests 8(2): 44.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Beeton, Tyler A., and Kathleen A. Galvin. 2017. Wood-based bioenergy in western Montana: the importance of understanding path dependence and local context for resilience. Ecology and Society 22(2): 9. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-09157-220209
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Chung, W., Evangelista, P., Anderson, N., Vorster, A., Han, H., Poudel, K., Sturtevant, R. 2017. Estimating Aboveground Tree Biomass for Beetle-Killed Lodgepole Pine in the Rocky Mountains of Northern Colorado. Forest Science. doi: 10.5849/FS.2016-065
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2016 Citation: Field, J.L., Tanger, P., Shackley, S.J., Haefele, S.M. 2016. Agricultural residue gasification for low-cost, low-carbon decentralized power: an empirical case study in Cambodia. Applied Energy, 177: 612-624.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2016 Citation: Field, J.L., Marx, E., Easter, M., Adler, P.R., Paustian, K. 2016. Ecosystem model parameterization and adaptation for sustainable cellulosic biofuel landscape design. Global Change Biology Bioenergy, 8: 1106-1123.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2016 Citation: Han, H., W. Chung, N. Anderson. 2016. Comparing productivity and costs of two beetle-killed stand harvesting methods in northern Colorado. In Proceedings of the DEMO/COFE International Conference: Canadas Forest Sector-Adapting to a New Reality; Technology and Innovations as a Catalyst for Success. September 19-21, 2016, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Hood, P.R., K.N. Nelson, C.C. Rhoades, and D.B. Tinker. 2017. The effect of post-mountain pine beetle salvage treatments on fuel loads and fuel moisture dynamics in Colorado lodgepole pine forests. Forest Ecology and Management 390: 80-88.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2016 Citation: Jacobson, R., R.F. Keefe, Smith, A.M.S., Laninga, T.J., Inman, D., Metlen, S. Saul, D.A., and S.M. Newman. 2016. Multi spatial analysis of forest residue utilization for bioenergy. Biofuels, Bioproducts, and Biorefining 10.1002/bbb.1659
  • Type: Theses/Dissertations Status: Published Year Published: 2016 Citation: Kim, Y. 2016. The effect of downed-trees on harvesting productivity and costs in beetle-killed stands. MS thesis. Oregon State University, 60 p.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Accepted Year Published: 2017 Citation: Kim, Y., W. Chung, H. Han, and N. Anderson. 2017. The effect of downed-trees on harvesting productivity and costs in beetle-killed stands. Accepted by Forest Science.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Kim, Y., W. Chung, N. Anderson. 2016. Modeling Equipment Cycle Times for Beetle-killed Stand Harvesting. In Proceedings of the DEMO/COFE International Conference: Canadas Forest Sector-Adapting to a New Reality; Technology and Innovations as a Catalyst for Success. September 19-21, 2016, Vancouver, BC, Canada.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Pressler Y, Foster E., Cotrufo M.F., Moore J. 2017. Coupled biochar amendment and limited irrigation strategies do not affect a degraded soil food web in a maize agroecosystem, compared to the native grassland. Global Change Biology Bioenergy. doi: 10.1111/gcbb.12429
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2016 Citation: Foster, E.J., Hansen, N., Wallenstein, M., Cotrufo, M.F. 2016. Biochar and manure amendments impact soil nutrients and microbial enzymatic activities in a semi-arid irrigated maize cropping system. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, 233: 404-414.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Rhoades C.C., Hubbard R.M., Elder K. 2017. A Decade of Streamwater Nitrogen and Forest Dynamics after a Mountain Pine Beetle Outbreak at the Fraser Experimental Forest, Colorado. Ecosystems 20:380-392. DOI: 10.1007/s10021-016-0027-6.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Rhoades C.C., Minatre K.L., Pierson D.N., Fegel T.S., Cotrufo M.F., Kelly E.F. (2017) Examining the Potential of Forest Residue-Based Amendments for Post-Wildfire Rehabilitation in Colorado, USA. Scientifica 2017:10p. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/4758316.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Vorster, A.G., Evangelista, P.H., Stohlgren, T.J., Kumar, S., Rhoades, C.C., Hubbard, R.M., Cheng, A.S., Elder, K. 2017. Severity of a mountain pine beetle outbreak across a range of stand conditions in Fraser Experimental Forest, Colorado, United States. Forest Ecology and Management. 389, 116126. doi:10.1016/j.foreco.2016.12.021
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Accepted Year Published: 2017 Citation: Western, Jessica M., Antony S. Cheng, Nathaniel M. Anderson, and Pam Motley. In press. Examining the social acceptability of forest biomass harvesting and utilization from collaborative forest landscape restoration: a case study from Western Colorado. Journal of Forestry.
  • Type: Theses/Dissertations Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Woodward, B.D. 2017. Evaluating Mortality Dynamics During a Spruce Beetle Epidemic in the Southern Colorado Rocky Mountains. MS Thesis, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2017 Citation: Young, N.E., Anderson, R.S., Chignell, S.M., Vorster, A.G., Lawrence, R., Evangelista, P.H. 2017. A survival guide to Landsat preprocessing. Ecology 98, 920932. doi:10.1002/ecy.1730
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Submitted Year Published: 2018 Citation: Campbell, R., T. Venn, and N. Anderson. In review. Heterogeneity in preferences for woody biomass energy in the US Mountain West. Submitted to Ecological Economics Campbell, R., T. Venn, and N. Anderson. In review. Cost and performance tradeoffs between mail and internet survey modes in a nonmarket valuation study. Submitted to the Journal of Environmental Management.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Submitted Year Published: 2018 Citation: Han, H., W. Chung, L. Wells, N. Anderson. 2017. Optimizing Biomass Feedstock Logistics for Forest Residue Processing and Transportation Using Mixed Integer Programming. Submitted to Canadian Journal of Forest Research.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Submitted Year Published: 2018 Citation: Hogland, J., and N. Anderson. In review. Function modeling improves the efficiency of spatial modeling using big data from remote sensing. Submitted to Big Data and Cognitive Computing.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Submitted Year Published: 2018 Citation: Jackson, D. and P. Wilson. Good Neighbor Authority and Forest Restoration in the Inland Northwest Region. Revise and resubmit, Society and Natural Resources.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Submitted Year Published: 2018 Citation: Ramlow M. and Cotrufo M.F. Woody biochar greenhouse gas mitigation potential across agricultural soils, fertilization and soil moisture regimes. Submitted to Global Change Biology Bioenergy.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Under Review Year Published: 2017 Citation: Savage, S., Lawrence, R., Squires, J. Mapping post-disturbance forest landscape composition with Landsat satellite imagery. In review at Forest Ecology and Management.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Under Review Year Published: 2017 Citation: Stovall, A., Vorster, A.G., Anderson, R.S., Evangelista, P.H., Shugart, H.H. Non-destructive aboveground biomass estimation of coniferous trees using terrestrial LiDAR. In review at Remote Sensing of Environment.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Under Review Year Published: 2017 Citation: Field, J.L., Evans, S.G., Marx, E., Easter, M., Adler, P.R., Dinh, T., Willson, B., Paustian, K. High-resolution techno-ecological modeling shows new bioenergy landscape mitigation opportunities. In review at Nature Energy.


Progress 09/01/15 to 08/31/16

Outputs
Target Audience: BANR has been actively engaged in communication with several of our target audiences since the project was officially announced in October 2013, and has undertaken more formal communication and outreach strategies for different audiences as the project has grown. BANR team members have engaged other scientists working within the broader NIFA biofuel research program, particularly in other CAPs, via personal contacts (email, telephone, at meetings) to develop collaborations on research, teaching, and outreach activities. BANR director Keith Paustian and Project Manager, John Field, have participated in NARA annual meetings. Presentations about BANR project objectives and initial research results have been given at national meetings, institutional seminars, and local meetings, including the Colorado State University Agricultural Innovations Summit, Small Log Conference, National Energy Summit, Society of American Foresters Annual Meeting, American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Oregon Logging Conference, and the High Altitude Revegetation Workshop, Central Rockies Chapter of the Society for Ecological Restoration Conference, and others. BANR also contributed a delegation to the 2015 AFRI Bioenergy Project Directors meeting in Denver, Colorado. The general public is an important target audience with whom we have engaged since the start of the project. The project web site was launched the day the project was officially announced, and build-out and improvements have been ongoing. The site now includes a clearinghouse of web links about the mountain pine beetle infestation and woody biomass energy technologies (http://banr.nrel.colostate.edu/news-resources/links-publications/). Our Education team webinar series now features 16 webinars uploaded to YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/user/banrbioenergy) which have accumulated more than 500 views to date, and the team is exploring creating a TED Ed talk (http://ed.ted.com/) to reach wider audiences. Additional webinars led by the Extension team and targeted specifically towards landowners and forest managers were produced for project Year 3. BANR has also maintained an active presence on Twitter (https://twitter.com/BANR_Bioenergy) with over 300 followers to date. The project is currently developing a contact list for interested stakeholders to arrange for regular communication via newsletters, social media, in-person project meetings and stakeholder forums, with sign-up available through the project website (http://banr.nrel.colostate.edu/stakeholder-sign-up/). In addition to this general engagement, members of our Socio-Economic and Policy Assessment task team have been interviewing community organizations in the different BANR case study regions to gauge their awareness of and opinions on active management of forests and wood bioenergy issues, and will be following up these initial engagement efforts with formal survey instruments as the project progresses. A variety of other target audiences have been engaged in more specific ways. A subcommittee of the BANR Executive Committee and Project Advisory Board is in the process of developing a formal engagement strategy for Federal and State land management agencies, particularly the United States Forest Service, as they are a unique stakeholder and major landowner in the region. Likewise, private landowners have also been engaged through formal presentations to the Montana Forest Owners Association and the Colorado Bark Beetle Cooperative. The BANR management team has had contact with a variety of companies from the bioenergy industry, and has formed a new affiliation with Confluence Energy (Kremmling, CO). The Lifecycle Assessment task team convened a lifecycle assessment stakeholder 'focus group' from which we solicited feedback on scope, methods, and impact metrics at the end of summer 2015. This group included members from a variety of target audiences including industry, NGOs, landowners, and land management and regulatory agencies. Finally, teachers and students are the main target audience of the BANR Education task area. A dozen middle and high school teachers across the BANR project region have been working with the BANR Education team on bioenergy curriculum development since the summer of 2014, and teacher engagement is expanding through research experiences for teachers (RET). The project now has a full complement of graduate student trainees, most of whom have participated in the 'Biomass Technology' and 'Bioenergy Policy, Economics, and Environmental Assessment' graduate course sequence taught at Colorado State University with the participation of several project PIs. Additionally, a graduate course in Lifecycle Assessment was taught at Colorado State University, with support from BANR researchers. Changes/Problems:In year 3, we created an internal Industrial Relations Committee to facilitate dissemination of BANR products to a wider range of industrial interests, as recommended by the BANR Project Advisory Board. We also added a new industrial partner, Confluence Energy (Kremmling, CO) - the largest manufacturer of wood pellets in the inter-mountain west, as a BANR affiliate member. Individual task teams have made adjustments to their individual work plans as necessary in response to internal and eternal factors, for example: The Feedstock Logistics (Task 2.1) team experienced delays in their fieldwork schedule due to early spring thaw, and to wildfire threatening research sites in Idaho The Biochar (Task 3.2) team reallocated resources away from GHG monitoring in biochar-amended forest soils after no significant changes were observed, and towards a seedling growth study with potential commercial relevance The Lifecycle Assessment (Task 3.4) expanded the scope of their analysis scenarios to consider alternative bioenergy technologies, in response to feedback from the BANR Project Advisory Board What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?In addition to undergraduate, graduate and post-graduate training, the BANR project is supporting training and professional development at a variety of different levels. Undergraduate trainees have received training in field, lab, and other research settings while working with BANR research scientists and graduate students. At the graduate level, the project has contributed to the training of six graduate students being funded through the BANR project through collaboratively-taught coursework on bioenergy technology, policy, economics, and environmental assessment topics. Graduate students have also had the opportunity through BANR to present research at scientific conferences. The Feedstock Supply team continues to mentor NASA DEVELOP interns in the creation of BANR- and stakeholder-relevant products including the mapping of tree mortality from the current spruce beetle outbreak across Colorado and mapping tree species composition in the Colorado State Forest State Park. At the professional level, BANR is working with 12 'lead teachers' and one 'teacher-in-residence' drawn from across the project region on science curriculum development. Extension team members developed logging safety videos and other information products for the forest products industry. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Results have been disseminated to communities of interest in multiple ways: The Feedstock Supply team has published methods for detecting beetle outbreak severity from remotely-sensed imagery in the peer-reviewed journal Forest Science The Harvest Logistics team has developed productivity and cost models for harvesting beetle-kill stands, which are distributed through a free ArcGIS toolbar and available for download online The Biochar team has published a fact-sheet on Biochar through Colorado State University Extension The Lifecycle Assessment team held a stakeholder engagement session to ensure that efforts have maximum relevance to various consumers, to solicit technical feedback on the analysis from subject matter experts outside BANR, and to promote awareness and buy-in for our eventual final outputs The Socioeconomic & Policy Analysis team conducted several in-person interviews that have served to raise awareness of the BANR project and spark interest among a diverse range of individuals to further engage in this topic area The Extension team is continually working with landowners and stakeholders across the region, as well as producing informational publications and videos Results have been presented by BANR scientists and graduate students at a wide range of scientific and industry meetings and conferences Website revisions are underway to improve outreach and interaction with stakeholders, and better disseminate BANR products What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals?In project Year 4, our priority is to complete prototypes of the remaining assessment data products, promote interdisciplinary collaboration across the various task teams as those prototypes are refined into final products, and to expand our education, extension and outreach efforts to make sure that those products are received by the widest possible audience. We have recently launched an effort to identify and engage additional private sector companies across the region that might benefit from BANR results and products, in order to ensure that our planned activities have the maximum possible impact. Our education team is working with our BANR Lead Teachers to deploy and test K-12 curricula in forest ecology, biofuel conversion, and biochar that they created in classrooms across the four-state project area starting in Fall 2016. We are also in the process of re-designing the BANR website to make it more accessible to lay stakeholders and to feature education and extension products more prominently. We envision that these activities, coupled with publicity around the CPES fuel trials, will lead to impacts and outcomes in target audiences outside the project this year.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? Impact The Bioenergy Alliance Network of the Rockies (BANR) will assess the potential for an environmentally sustainable, economically viable and socially acceptable bioenergy industry in the Rocky Mountain region based on beetle-killed trees and other forest biomass, and provide the research, education, training and outreach to support the development of such systems. In many beetle-impacted forest stands, wood removed for forest restoration management and fire hazard reduction is not usable for traditional forest products and is instead burned in piles, resulting in the waste of a potentially valuable feedstock and often incurring significant environmental damages in the process. The BANR project will comprehensively study this unique biomass resource with a focus on conversion to 'drop-in' liquid transportation fuel blendstocks and valuable co-products via a novel, scalable thermochemical biomass conversion technology . Year 3 of the BANR project focused on the twin goals of producing liquid biofuels at pilot scale from locally-sourced beetle-killed wood, and completing prototype versions of key project deliverables including biomass feedstock atlases, a harvest logistics optimization model, and various sustainability assessment components. On the first goal, industrial partner Cool Planet Energy Systems (CPES) began running their pilot-scale pyrolysis system on beetle-killed wood pellets in the spring of 2016. They are on track to produce approximately 10 gallons (38 L) of high-octane gasoline blendstock by the end of the campaign this summer. On the second goal, significant progress has been made on several deliverables over the past year. The feedstock supply team has successfully demonstrated methodologies for estimating total standing biomass and percent mortality based on remote sensing products, and is in the process of completing preliminary biomass atlases for the three BANR Case Study Regions. The Harvest Logistics team has synthesized data collected during beetle-kill harvest operations in Colorado, Montana, and Idaho into an optimization model, and is working with CPES to refine a standard describing their feedstock requirement. The Lifecycle Assessment team completed a conceptual design and scoping exercise with input from the BANR Project Advisory Board and external stakeholders, and is in the process of prototyping the associated sub-models. The other sustainability assessment teams have made progress in evaluating site-level environmental impacts from harvest throughout the region, continuously monitoring vegetation response, changes in soil properties and GHG emissions from biochar-amended agricultural soils, initiating models and financial analyses for the CPES technology, and interviewing local stakeholders on their perceptions of beetle-kill harvest and the bioenergy industry, among other activities. Accomplishments to date (yr 3 in progress and start of the 3rd field season) for each of the major task: 1. Quantify and locate existing Feedstock Supply (Task 1) and develop tools for rapid detection and quantification ofnewly-occurring infestations. In Year 3, the Feedstock Supply team developed and published a method for identifying beetle-kill mortality percentage from remote sensing imagery. The team is combining this method for detecting beetle-kill mortality with aboveground biomass maps to spatially quantify and characterize beetle-killed biomass across the Medicine Bow case study region. 2. Evaluate Feedstock Logistics and Processing (Task 2) to improve financial viability of harvest, collection, processing, transport and storage of woody biomass feedstock materials The Feedstock Logistics and Processing team developed cost-minimization harvest logistics models based on data collected during observations of beetle-kill harvest in Colorado, Montana, and Idaho. The team has also coordinated with BANR affiliate, Confluence Energy, to provide commercially-available pellets to Cool Planet Energy Systems (CPES) for testing, as well as developed small batches of experimental pellets for characterization and small-scale testing by CPES. 3. Assess System Performance and Sustainability (Task 3) with regard to: - Environmental Impacts (Task 3.1) of different beetle-killed tree harvesting techniques in dominant forest types throughout the study region - The effectiveness of Biochar (Task 3.2) as a soil amendment and its potential to improve the greenhouse gas balance of the biofuel system - The economic and social practicality of harvest and biofuel production through Conversion Modeling (Task 3.3), Financial Analysis (Task 3.5), and Socioeconomic & Policy Analysis (Task 3.6) - The greenhouse gas mitigation potential and other environmental impacts of the full wood-based biofuel supply chain using Lifecycle Assessment (Task 3.4) - The intersection of supply availability, harvest logistical capability, and any other economic, environmental, or social constraints on harvest and conversion within a spatially-explicit web-based Decision Support System (Task3.7) The Environmental Impacts team has compiled site-level data on the effects of beetle-kill harvest on fuels availability and moisture, and seedling recruitment, and continues field monitoring efforts across the region during the 2016 field season. Monitoring of field experiments on the effects of biochar amendments are ongoing, and include the implementation of continuous GHG emissions monitoring capabilities. The Biochar team also published a biochar extension fact sheet. CPES has been testing beetle-kill feedstock materials in its pilot-scale pyrolysis system, which will inform of a model for estimating the net yields of energy products and biochar from a similar commercial-scale system. In Year 3 the Financial Analysis team collected production, financial, and economic data for a distributed scale (1.2 MW) biomass pyrolysis conversion with biochar co-products, and used the NREL HOMER model to examine the financial performance of the system under various operating and market conditions. Interviews were conducted by the Socioeconomic team with a variety of stakeholders across the BANR region and ethnographies around the management of beetle-kill lands and the bioenergy industry were developed. The Lifecycle Assessment team held a stakeholder engagement session in Year 3, observed the CPES pilot-scale conversion technology, and developed time-dependent climate impact metrics. The Decision Support System team is currently developing concepts for the design, which has been informed by participation in the LCA Focus Group and cross-task data integration discussions, particularly with the Harvest Logistics and Socioeconomic teams. 4. Increasing understanding of forest health and management issues and bioenergy literacy for students at all levels through a targeted Education (Task 4) program Highlights from the BANR Education program in Year 3 include the development and piloting of high school science units on BANR-relevant topics and the development and approval of a graduate-level lifecycle assessment course at Colorado State University. 5. Providing useful practical and timely information to communities and stakeholder groups on all aspects of a potential beetle-kill bioenergy industry through Extension and Outreach (Task 5) In year 3, the Extension and Outreach team developed and disseminated popular articles, videos and webinars for forest landowners, forest industry professionals, logging associations, other stakeholders and the general public. 6. Understanding and incorporating the concerns of communities regarding the Health & Safety (Task 6) of biofuel and biochar production and distribution Though most Health and Safety activities are planned for years 4-5, the team has hired a post-doc and completed some preliminary fieldwork and collaboration with CPES and a literature review.

Publications

  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2016 Citation: Anderson, N., and D. Mitchell. 2016. Forest operations and biomass logistics to improve efficiency, value and sustainability. BioEnergy Research, Special Issue on USDA Biomass and Bioenergy Research, available online ahead of publication: DOI 10.1007/s12155-016-9735-1
  • Type: Book Chapters Status: Awaiting Publication Year Published: 2016 Citation: Anderson, N., R. Bergman, and D. Page-Dumroese. In press. A supply chain approach to biochar systems. Chapter 2 in Biochar: A Regional Supply Chain Approach in View of Climate Change Mitigation, V. Bruckman (editor), Cambridge University Press, UK
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Under Review Year Published: 2016 Citation: Hogland, J. and N. Anderson. In review. Bringing images to a common radiometric scale using Aggregate No Change Regression: An accurate and easy to use technique. Submitted to Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Under Review Year Published: 2016 Citation: Hogland, J., N. Anderson and R. Ahl. In review. Inexpensive representative sample selection methods using a multivariate two sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. Submitted to Remote Sensing.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Under Review Year Published: 2016 Citation: Hood, P.R., K.N. Nelson, C.C. Rhoades, and D.B. Tinker. The effect of post-mountain pine beetle salvage treatments on fuel loads and fuel moisture dynamics in Colorado lodgepole pine forests. Submitted to Forest Ecology and Management.
  • Type: Other Status: Published Year Published: 2016 Citation: Jackson, D. and P. Wilson. 2016. Woody Biomass from Forest Operations in the Inland Northwest Region. Biomass Magazine, April 2016
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2016 Citation: Jacobson, R., R.F. Keefe, A.M.S. Smith, T.J. Laninga, D. Inman, S. Metlen, D.A. Saul and S.M. Newman. 2016. Multi spatial analysis of forest residue utilization for bioenergy. Biofuels, Bioproducts, and Biorefining.
  • Type: Other Status: Published Year Published: 2015 Citation: Kolb, P. 2015. The role of woody debris. Pp. 59- 60 In: Montana Forestry Best Management Practices, Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation. Ziesak, R., Sugden, B., Sims, B., Kolb, P. and Sanders G. eds. 63 PGS.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2016 Citation: Field, J.L., E. Marx, M. Easter, P.R. Adler, and K. Paustian. 2016. Ecosystem model parameterization and adaptation for sustainable cellulosic biofuel landscape design. GCB Bioenergy, DOI: 10.1111/gcbb.12316
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Awaiting Publication Year Published: 2016 Citation: Field, J.L., P. Tanger, and S.M. Haefele. (2016) Agricultural residue gasification for low-cost, low-carbon decentralized power. Accepted for publication in Applied Energy.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Published Year Published: 2015 Citation: Hogland, J. and N. Anderson. 2015. Estimating Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) plot characteristics using NAIP imagery, Function Modeling, and the RMRS Raster Utility coding library. Proceedings of the 2015 Forest Inventory and Analysis Science Symposium, Portland, OR.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2016 Citation: Long, J. and R. Lawrence. 2016. Mapping percent mortality due to mountain pine bark-beetle damage. Forest Science. http://dx.doi.org/10.5849/forsci.15-046
  • Type: Other Status: Published Year Published: 2016 Citation: Ramlow, M., C.M.H. Keske and M.F. Cotrufo. 2016. Biochar in Colorado. Colorado State University Extension. Crop Series|Soil. Fact sheet N.0.509
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Awaiting Publication Year Published: 2016 Citation: Rhoades, C.C., R.M. Hubbard, and K. Elder. 2016. A decade of streamwater nitrogen and forest dynamics after a mountain pine beetle outbreak at the Fraser Experimental Forest, Colorado. (accepted with minor revisions Ecosystems).


Progress 09/01/14 to 08/31/15

Outputs
Target Audience:BANR has been actively engaged in communication with several of our target audiences since the project was officially announced in October 2013, and has undertaken more formal communication and outreach strategies for different audiences as the project has grown. BANR team members have engaged other scientists working within the broader NIFA biofuel research program, particularly in other CAPs, via personal contacts (email, telephone, at meetings) to develop collaborations on research, teaching, and outreach activities. BANR director Keith Paustian participated in the 2014 NARA annual meeting, and the two CAPs are exploring the possibility of collaborating on a forest research field site. Presentations about BANR project objectives and initial research results have been given at national meetings, institutional seminars and local meetings, including the Colorado State University Agricultural Innovations Summit, Small Log Conference, National Energy Summit, Oregon Logging Conference, and the High Altitude Revegetation Workshop and Central Rockies Chapter of the Society for Ecological Restoration Conference. BANR also contributed a four-member delegation to the 2014 AFRI Bioenergy Project Directors meeting. The general public is an important target audience with whom we have engaged since the start of the project. The project web site was launched the day the project was officially announced, and build-out and improvements have been ongoing. The site now includes a clearinghouse of web links about the mountain pine beetle infestation and woody biomass energy technologies (http://banr.nrel.colostate.edu/news-resources/links-publications/). Our Education team webinar series now features 11 webinars uploaded to YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/user/banrbioenergy) which have accumulated more than 300 view to date, and the team is exploring creating a TED Ed talk (http://ed.ted.com/) to reach wider audiences. Additional webinars led by the Extension team and targeted specifically towards landowners and forest managers are planned for project Year 3. BANR has also maintained an active presence on Twitter (https://twitter.com/BANR_Bioenergy) with 200 followers to date. The project is currently developing a contact list for interested stakeholders to arrange for regular communication via newsletters, social media, in-person project meetings and stakeholder forums, with sign-up available through the project website (http://banr.nrel.colostate.edu/stakeholder-sign-up/). In addition to this general engagement, members of our Socio-Economic and Policy Assessment task team are starting to work with community organizations in the different BANR case study regions to gauge their awareness of and opinions on active management of forests and wood bioenergy issues, and will be following up these initial engagement efforts with formal survey instruments as the project progresses. A variety of other target audiences have been engaged in more specific ways. A subcommittee of the BANR Executive Committee and Project Advisory Board is in the process of developing a formal engagement strategy for Federal and State land management agencies, particularly the United States Forest Service, as they are a unique stakeholder and major landowner in the region. Likewise, private landowners have also been engaged through formal presentations to the Montana Forest Owners Association and the Colorado Bark Beetle Cooperative. The BANR management team has had contact with a variety of companies from the bioenergy industry, and is exploring opportunities for expanding the BANR project membership accordingly. The Lifecycle Assessment task team is planning to convene a lifecycle assessment stakeholder 'focus group' from which we can solicit feedback on scope, methods, and impact metrics at the end of summer 2015. This group will include members from a variety of target audiences including industry, NGOs, landowners, and land management and regulatory agencies. Finally, teachers and students are the main target audience of the BANR Education task area. A dozen middle and high school teachers across the BANR project region have been working with the BANR Education team on bioenergy curriculum development since the summer of 2014, and teacher engagement is expanding through a research experience for teachers (RET) component next year. The project now has a full complement of graduate student trainees, most of whom have participated in the 'Biomass Technology' and 'Bioenergy Policy, Economics, and Environmental Assessment' graduate course sequence taught at Colorado State University with the participation of several project PIs. Changes/Problems:The project has made several adjustments to timelines, scoping, and resource allocation in response to events on the ground, preliminary results obtained, and project stakeholder feedback: An early thaw in Colorado resulted in the cancellation of some late-season harvest activities in the Colorado State Forest State Park that several BANR teams (Harvest Logistics and Environmental Impacts) had planned to study. Since this harvest will probably now be postponed until winter 2015/2016, it has introduced some delay and caused these groups to re-adjust their fieldwork schedules accordingly. The Biochar task work originally included field trials looking at productivity and biogeochemistry response to biochar application in a variety of agricultural, forest, and land reclamation systems across the BANR study area. Observations to date for biochar applications in natural forest systems suggest minimal effects on productivity and overall system greenhouse gas balance, suggesting minimal system-level benefits to this market. As such, we have re-allocated resources away from this topic to make up for shortfalls elsewhere in the project budget (specifically, we have reallocated to the Health & Safety task to make their budget more commensurate with their work plan). While the original proposal called for testing the prototype CPES conversion system on forest biomass samples collected directly by the Harvest Logistics team, BANR researches have determined it to be more practical, flexible, and cost-effective to test proxy biomass samples made from mixtures of commercially-available standard biomass products sourced from a third-party supplier. Initial system testing is proceeding along these lines. This change has minimal implications for the overall project timeline or internal resource allocation. What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided?In addition to directly supporting 2 undergraduate studend full-time equivalents (FTE), 12 grad student FTE, and 2 post-doctoral researcher FTE, the BANR project is supporting training and professional development at a variety of different levels. At the undergraduate level, BANR participation in an undergraduate research experience offered the undergraduate student the opportunity to develop her science skills, while providing training in mentorship for her graduate student advisor. At the graduate level, the project has contributed to the training of six graduate students being funded through the BANR project through collaboratively-taught coursework on bioenergy technology, policy, economics, and environmental assessment topics. Our researchers have also helped to mentor students at both levels in the NASA DEVELOP program (http://develop.larc.nasa.gov/) to produce a 25-year forest harvest history map for the Medicine Bow mountain range in northern Colorado/southern Wyoming with utility in helping to inform forest management. At the professional level, BANR is working with 12 'lead teachers' and one 'teacher-in-residence' drawn from across the project region on science curriculum development. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest?Preliminary project results have been (or will be by the end of project year 2) disseminated through a variety of diverse avenues: The Feedstock Supply team has participated in creating an atlas of timber harvest history in the Colorado State Forest State Park, a potential valuable resource for more precise future management of those forests. The Biochar team authored a biochar extension paper (Ramlow et al. in revision) exploring the potential benefits of biochar to Rocky Mountain growers. The Biochar team also collaborated with Wildlands Restoration Volunteers, a local ecological restoration volunteer group in Fort Collins, to transfer knowledge regarding use of biochar in restoration projects and to apply the treatments for the forest road remediation study. The Socioeconomic & Policy Analysis team members performed outreach to federal and non-federal land management agency personnel to gather information about forestry projects involving beetle-kill forests and other forest restoration activities, resulting in a broader population of agency personnel being aware of the BANR project and the larger goals of the USDA National Institute for Food and Agriculture's investment in bioenergy The Extension team is currently preparing a webinar series for information dissemination to landowners and other project stakeholders this fall. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? The Feedstock Supply team will spend another summer season in the field in the Medicine Bow Mountains collecting stand characterization data for remote sensing model training and validation. The team will also work on scaling their methods of assessing infestation extent and intensity up to larger areas. The Harvest Logistics and Feedstock Preprocessing teams will work with forest contractors to observe lodgepole harvest operations across the 4-state BANR project area. Much of this harvest activity takes place in the winter months when frozen ground minimizes the soil impacts of heavy machinery, and snow cover reduces hazards associated with burns to dispose of non-salvageable residues. Our Cool Planet Energy System partners will complete long-term testing in one of their research-scale prototypes of proxy beetle-kill biomass material sourced from local vendors with the help of BANR USFS personnel. The Environmental Impacts team will spend the summer field season characterizing stands in active harvest areas (repeated assessments before and after harvest) and across previously-harvested areas (paired chronosequence-type plots) in order to assess management effects on stand recovery and ecosystem carbon storage. The Biochar team will establish a peach orchard biochar field trial in the Colorado Western Slope, and will continue to assess the effects of biochar addition in a Front Range irrigated corn system and for road and burn pile scar reclamation. The team will also collaborate with members of the Lifecycle Assessment team on expanding the DayCent biogeochemistry model with biochar modeling capability, using it as a tool to test various hypotheses of biochar effect mechanisms on agroecosystem productivity and biogeochemistry against empirical data collect from greenhouse and field experiments. The Conversion Modeling and Financial Assessment teams will work with our Cool Planet Energy Systems partners on collecting preliminary data on the performance of recent iterations of the CPES technology. The Lifecycle Assessment team is in the process of developing a first-order initial assessment of climate impacts of utilizing beetle-kill wood feedstock for liquid fuel/biochar production or alternative bioenergy uses (e.g., heat and power) versus leaving the material to degrade in place. This is currently a highly contentious topic in the academic literature, and the insights developed will likely have great value for both industry and policymakers. The Socio-Economic and Policy Assessment team will deploy their new survey instruments in select communities within the previously-identified BANR case study regions. The Education team will work with their lead teachers to pilot the bioenergy curricula they have been developing in classrooms across Colorado, Montana, and Wyoming in the next school year. The Extension team will organize a webinar series to engage with project stakeholders. The Health & Safety team will observe CPES systems in operation as their development schedule permits.

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? IMPACT The Bioenergy Alliance Network of the Rockies (BANR) will assess the potential for an environmentally sustainable, economically viable and socially acceptable biofuel industry in the Rocky Mountain region based on beetle-killed trees and other forest biomass, and provide the research, education, training and outreach to support the development of such systems.In many beetle-impacted forest stands, wood removed for forest restoration management and fire hazard reduction is not usable for traditional forest products and is instead burned in piles, resulting in the waste of a potentially valuable feedstock and often incurring significant additional environmental damages in the process. The BANR project will comprehensively study this unique biomass resource with a focus on conversion to 'drop-in' liquid transportation fuels and valuable co-products via a novel, scalable, locally sited thermochemical biomass conversion technology that minimizes feedstock transport distances and system environmental impacts. The BANR project is currently in a growth phase, with forest research field plots being established and modeling and assessment activities initiated. We anticipate producing initial prototype versions of several key project outputs by the end of the calendar year: A detailed spatially-explicit assessment of the amount of wood potentially available from beetle-kill forest restoration and fuel reduction operations, initially focusing on northern Colorado and the Helena National Forest An initial estimate of the greenhouse gas mitigation potential and other environmental and economic performance metrics of the 'beetle-kill to liquid biofuel' supply chain in the Rockies Middle and high school science curriculum units on bioenergy topics being developed in cooperation with the group of 12 BANR 'lead teachers' and our 'teacher in residence' Dissemination of these prototype outputs will represent tangible product impacts, and should provide direct value to project stakeholders as well as invaluable feedback to the BANR team for further developing and refining the final versions. Accomplishments to date (yr 2 in progress and start of the 2nd field season) are listed below for each of the major task areas: 1. Quantify and locate existing Feedstock Supply (Task 1) and develop tools for rapid detection and quantification of newly-occurring infestations. The Feedstock Supply team has completed one field season characterizing forest stands in northern Colorado in order to serve as training data for mapping techniques based on remote sensing, and is currently preparing a second season. Regionally-specific allometric equations have been developed enabling foresters to make more accurate estimates of forest biomass from measurements of tree basal area within our project study area. 2. Evaluate Feedstock Logistics and Processing (Task 2) to improve financial viability of harvest, collection, processing, transport and storage of woody biomass feedstock materials The Feedstock Logistics and Processing team has completed the first round of observations of winter harvest and biomass management operations at select privately-owned forest sites, with similar activities planned in various settings across the BANR project area in the coming year. As part of that work, an unmanned aerial vehicle was successfully tested as an efficient tool for estimating the biomass content of slash piles. The team has also begun to compile and preprocess spatial data inputs necessary for producing estimates of biomass harvest and transport costs, and performed preliminary evaluation of several different analytical approaches. 3. Assess System Performance and Sustainability (Task 3) with regard to: - Environmental Impacts (Task 3.1) of different beetle-killed tree harvesting techniques in dominant forest types throughout the study region - The effectiveness of Biochar (Task 3.2) as a soil amendment and its potential to improve the greenhouse gas balance of the biofuel system - The economic and social practicality of harvest and biofuel production through Conversion Modeling (Task 3.3), Financial Analysis (Task 3.5), and Socioeconomic & Policy Analysis (Task 3.6) - The greenhouse gas mitigation potential and other environmental impacts of the full wood-based biofuel supply chain using Lifecycle Assessment (Task 3.4) - The intersection of supply availability, harvest logistical capability, and any other economic, environmental, or social constraints on harvest and conversion within a spatially-explicit web-based Decision Support System (Task3.7) The Environmental Impacts team (Task 3.1) is currently identifying research field sites at which they can assess the direct ecosystem effects of beetle-kill harvest across the BANR study area, including before-and-after evaluations of current harvest operations as well as comparing the recovery of previously-harvested areas to adjacent paired non-harvest plots. The Biochar team (Task 3.2) continues observations on peach and corn biochar field trials. The Lifecycle Assessment team (Task 3.4) is close to submitting to a peer-reviewed journal a novel analysis of bioenergy LCA methods and a new classification system for LCA climate impacts will inform other LCA practitioners and help in identifying gaps and shortcomings in current LCA methods applied to bioenergy (Field et al., in prep). The Socioeconomic & Policy Analysis team (Task 3.6) is in the process of designing survey instruments and identifying survey target communities in order to better assess stakeholder knowledge, concerns, and needs around the proposed bioenergy technology. Efforts towards creating models of fuel conversion (Task 3.3), assessing system financial performance (Task 3.5), and mobilizing assessment tools into a web-based decision support system (Task 3.7) and are still early in their development, but are expected to be among the key project outputs made available to the public. 4. Increasing understanding of forest health and management issues and bioenergy literacy for students at all levels through a targeted Education (Task 4) program The BANR 'lead teacher' and 'teacher-in-residence' programs have contributed to middle and high school science curriculum development; science units are currently being designed, and will be trialed and refined in classrooms across the project region next year. 5. Providing useful practical and timely information to communities and stakeholder groups on all aspects of a potential beetle-kill bioenergy industry through Extension and Outreach (Task 5) Building strong, collaborative relationships between the Extension team and BANR research teams is essential for providing useful and consistent information to stakeholders and the general public, as well as providing feedback from stakeholders to researchers. The extension team held a stakeholder workshop in Montana in April 2015 at which they conducted a survey of logging professionals in order to better understand local biomass harvesting capabilities and needs. Other initial activities from this group include design specifications for the Extension section of the BANR website (http://banr.nrel.colostate.edu/), and templates for project fact sheets, posters, and presentations. 6. Understanding and incorporating the concerns of communities regarding the Health & Safety (Task 6) of biofuel and biochar production and distribution The Health & Safety team did not have any formal deliverables planned for Year 2. However, the group has initiated a literature review and set up a shared citation library for managing references. In addition, the group participated in a planning meeting at the Cool Planet Energy Systems research campus in California to become more acquainted with the technology and initiate scoping and planning activities for work to be undertaken in subsequent years of the project.

Publications

  • Type: Other Status: Submitted Year Published: 2015 Citation: Ramlow, M., Keske, C.M.H., Cotrufo, M.F. 2015. (submitted) Biochar in Colorado. Colorado State University Extension fact sheet.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2015 Citation: Rhoades, C.C., and P.J. Fornwalt. 2015. Pile Burning Creates a Fifty-Year Legacy of Openings in Regenerating Lodgepole Pine Forests in Colorado. Forest Ecology and Management 336:203-209.
  • Type: Journal Articles Status: Published Year Published: 2015 Citation: Rhoades, C.C., P.J. Fornwalt, M.W. Paschke, A. Shanklin, and J.L. Jonas. 2015. Recovery of small pile burn scars in conifer forests of the Colorado Front Range. Forest Ecology and Management 347:180-187.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Accepted Year Published: 2015 Citation: Vorster, A.G., P.H. Evangelista, T.J. Stohlgren, S. Kumar, R. Hubbard, T. Cheng, K. Elder. 2015. (presentation) Relating Severity of a Mountain Pine Beetle Outbreak to Forest Management History. North Central Climate Science Center Open Science Conference. May 20, 2015, Fort Collins, CO.
  • Type: Book Chapters Status: Under Review Year Published: 2015 Citation: Anderson, N., R. Bergman, and D. Page-Dumroese. (in review) A supply chain approach to biochar systems. Chapter 2 in Biochar: A Regional Supply Chain Approach in View of Climate Change Mitigation, V. Bruckman (ed.), Cambridge University Press.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Accepted Year Published: 2015 Citation: Anderson, N. and K. Paustian. 2015. (invited presentation) Bioenergy Alliance Network of the Rockies: Sustainable Bioenergy from Beetle-Killed Trees in the Northern Rockies. Small Log Conference, Coeur dAlene, ID.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Accepted Year Published: 2015 Citation: Han, H., W. Chung, and L. Wells. 2015. A mathematical approach to biomass feedstock logistics problems. In Proceedings of the 2015 Council on Forest Engineering (COFE) Annual Meeting, Lexington, KY, July 19-22, 2015.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Accepted Year Published: 2014 Citation: Jacobson, R. and R.F. Keefe. 2014. (presentation) Modeling woody biomass utilization for energy feedstock in the northwest United States. Society of American Foresters National Convention and International Union of Forestry Research Organizations World Congress, Salt Lake City, Utah. October, 2014.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Accepted Year Published: 2015 Citation: Ramlow, M. 2015. (presentation) Biochars impact on nitrogen cycling in agricultural systems and potential mechanisms. 21st Annual Front Range Student Ecology Symposium, Fort Collins, CO.


Progress 09/01/13 to 08/31/14

Outputs
Target Audience: Project participants have been actively engaged in communication with several of our target audiences since the project was officially announced in October 2013, and more formal communication and outreach strategies for different audiences are being prepared as the project gets fully underway. Other scientists working within the broader NIFA biofuel research program, particularly in other CAPs, have been engaged via personal contacts (email, telephone, at meetings) to develop collaborations on research, teaching and outreach activities. NARA co-director Mike Wolcott participated in the BANR project kickoff meeting, and BANR project extension personnel participate in regular cross-CAP teleconferences. Presentations about BANR project objectives and initial research results have been given at national meetings, institutional seminars and local meetings, including the Northwest Wood-based Biofuels and Co-Products Conference and the Front Range Student Ecology Symposium. Project objectives, work plans and accomplishments are also communicated to other interested scientists and educators via the project web site (see below). The general public is an important target audience with whom we have engaged since the start of the project. The project web site (http://banr.colostate.edu/) was launched the day the project was officially announced, and build-out and improvements such as the addition of social media features have been ongoing. Several press releases have been made and a number of interviews given for articles written in national, state and local media (newspapers, trade journals, radio), and BANR investigators and CPES personnel have participated in several local citizen meetings such as that of the Colorado Renewable Energy Society. A 2-page color brochure of the project was developed for general distribution, giving a project overview and contact information for interested stakeholders. Other stakeholders, including industry and NGOs have been engaged, mostly informally to date, via email and personal contacts. The project is currently developing a contact list for interested stakeholders to arrange for regular communication via newsletters, social media, in-person project meetings and stakeholder forums. A subcommittee of the BANR Executive Committee and Project Advisory Board is in the process of developing a formal engagement strategy for Federal and State land management agencies, particularly USFS. Likewise, private landowners have also been engaged through formal presentations to the Montana Forest Owners Association and the Colorado Bark Beetle Cooperative. More formal efforts to engage industry, NGOs, landowners and other stakeholders is underway within the BANR Extension and Outreach teams. Teachers and students are the main target audience of the BANR education task area. Several middle and high school teachers from each state in the BANR project region have been recruited to participate in bioenergy curriculum development beginning in the summer of 2014. All recruits will participate in an initial orientation and training program in Fort Collins in mid-July, including a visit to local beetle-kill management areas. Several graduate students and undergraduates who will be working in the BANR project have also been recruited and are starting work. Changes/Problems: Nothing Reported What opportunities for training and professional development has the project provided? Year 1 professional development activities largely focused on technical training for research staff, field training for students and technicians, and engagement with middle and high school teachers. Students and technicians participating in a variety of BANR research areas (Feedstock Supply, Environmental Impacts, Biochar, etc.) are receiving training on field protocols and methods for field data collection during the 2014 summer field season. Personnel from the Feedstock Supply team attended training workshops to learn processing and analyses methods for LiDAR and other remote sensing data in Boulder, CO and Fort Collins, CO. Graduate students hired in Year 1 will begin training with their advisors at their respective institutions at the end of Year 1. Middle and high school teachers selected for the Lead Teacher program will participate in bioenergy-related science education professional development, starting summer 2014 with a webinar followed by the kick-off teacher workshop in July 2014. How have the results been disseminated to communities of interest? The BANR team has made significant progress toward stakeholder engagement, even as more formal outreach and engagement strategies are still being developed. At the BANR kick-off meeting in December 2013 a public session was held to inform interested community members of the project. Project information is widely accessible through our project website (http://banr.colostate.edu/) which has been populated with basic project information including a project overview, contact information, and task descriptions, and work is ongoing to enhance its design, functionality, and content. Further, we have a BANR Twitter account (@BANR_Bioenergy) to post announcements or relevant news articles to the public. The Project Director, co-Directors and other investigators have been very responsive to the media, and BANR has already been featured in multiple news articles by publications within and outside of the BANR project area. Extension and outreach staff have presented BANR project introductions to interested community groups. What do you plan to do during the next reporting period to accomplish the goals? The following are specific activities and outcomes planned for Year 2: - Strengthen internal project communications and collaborations - Distribute preliminary biomass atlas internally among BANR investigators - Publish beetle-kill wood market survey and initiation of logistics operations studies - Develop a detailed beetle-kill wood specification for CPES conversion technology - Initial parameterization of forest succession model based on preliminary results of intensive and extensive field site sampling - Initial parameterization of biochar GHG balance model based preliminary results of biochar field trial GHG measurements - Develop input-output model representing CPES conversion technology performance - Engage lifecycle assessment stakeholders, and finalize LCA scope, tools, and inventory data sources - Complete policy review and stakeholder interviews in key communities - Create and implement K-12 and undergraduate education curricula - Develop a broad public engagement strategy

Impacts
What was accomplished under these goals? IMPACT The Bioenergy Alliance Network of the Rockies (BANR) will assess the potential for an environmentally sustainable, economically viable and socially acceptable biofuel industry in the Rocky Mountain region based on beetle-killed trees and other forest biomass, and provide the research, education, training and outreach to support the development of such systems. Over 42 million acres of western forests have been significantly impacted by bark beetles, resulting in 100s of millions of tons of potential feedstock material. In many beetle-impacted forest stands, wood removed for forest restoration management and fire hazard reduction is not usable for traditional forest products and is instead burned in piles, resulting in the waste of a potentially valuable feedstock and often incurring significant additional environmental damages in the process. The BANR project will comprehensively study this unique biomass resource with a focus on conversion to ‘drop-in’ liquid transportation fuels and valuable co-products via a novel, scalable, locally sited thermochemical biomass conversion technology that minimizes feedstock transport distances and system environmental impacts. While the BANR project is only in its initial stages, potential impacts are large. A detailed spatially-explicit assessment of the amount of wood potentially available from beetle-kill forest restoration and fuel reduction operations is a major objective of the project, and we anticipate the potential for millions of gallons of renewable fuel production across the region. Project research will enable accurate determination of the ‘carbon footprint’ and other environmental and economic performance metrics of such production, to determine where and how much biomass can be sustainably utilized, and to estimate the associated reduction in fossil fuel dependency and greenhouse gas emissions. Planned socio-economic and policy research will assess impacts on jobs and economic development in small rural communities in the region, many of which have suffered losses from the decline in traditional forest industries. Finally, the project will determine the potential of active management of forests in the region, driven by economically-viable biomass harvest and utilization, to yield healthier forests and improve ecosystem services. GOALS AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS 1. Quantify and locate existing Feedstock Supply (Task 1) and develop tools for rapid detection and quantification of newly-occurring infestations The Feedstock Supply team has focused on planning and developing infrastructure, such as repositories of GIS resources, field measurement data, and literature. Task members have established active collaborations with other task groups, including field research site coordination, allometric equation testing using terrestrial LiDAR scans and field data collection. The team is producing a preliminary coarse-resolution feedstock atlas for the BANR area, giving other BANR researchers a tool for experimental design or modeling purposes. It is expected that BANR members will provide feedback on the utility of the preliminary feedstock atlas, allowing them to refine the design of subsequent iterations. 2. Evaluate Feedstock Logistics and Processing (Task 2) to improve financial viability of harvest, collection, processing, transport and storage of woody biomass feedstock materials A challenge for this research is to identify existing active harvest operations at sites and with treatments that are relevant to the BANR plan of study on which to piggyback shift-level operations studies. Significant progress has been made towards identifying such sites across the BANR study area, including sites in Colorado and Montana. Extensive coordination with the Feedstock Supply and Environmental Impacts teams ensures that the sites being identified are consistent with the stand types and treatments most relevant to the BANR project as a whole, and makes optimal use of project personnel resources. 3. Assess System Performance and Sustainability (Task 3) with regard to: - Environmental Impacts (Task 3.1) of different beetle-killed tree harvesting techniques in dominant forest types throughout the study region - The effectiveness of Biochar (Task 3.2) as a soil amendment and its potential to improve the greenhouse gas balance of the biofuel system - The economic and social practicality of harvest and biofuel production through Conversion Modeling (Task 3.3), Financial Analysis (Task 3.5), and Socioeconomic & Policy Analysis (Task 3.6) - The greenhouse gas mitigation potential and other environmental impacts of the full wood-based biofuel supply chain using Lifecycle Assessment (Task 3.4) - The intersection of supply availability, harvest logistical capability, and any other economic, environmental, or social constraints on harvest and conversion within a spatially-explicit web-based Decision Support System (Task 3.7) The Environmental Impacts team has focused on laying the groundwork for a successful summer field campaign. Successful establishment of an intensive network of field sites will allow team members to make inferences about the rate of biomass recovery, stand succession, and soil biogeochemistry post-infestation in the presence or absence of salvage logging. Careful experimental design is key for the Biochar team, especially for the advanced GHG measurement capabilities being developed. While reduction of GHG emissions from intensive agriculture is a proposed benefit of biochar use, few field-based measurements are currently available, in particular continuous measurements as are being designed for the dryland corn biochar field trials. Continuous N2O measurements in multiple amended and control plots planned here will represent a significant contribution to the literature. Outcomes for subtasks 3.3-3.7 are more limited in Year 1. Proper scoping of these tasks at the project outset is essential for a) ensuring that the full range of economic, environmental, and social sustainability criteria necessary to predict system viability are represented, b) providing guidance to the teams doing fieldwork to ensure that data produced is appropriate for the broader project analytical framework, and c) maintaining consistency in scope and scenario assumptions across all of the modeling-based and integrative research objectives. 4. Increasing understanding of forest health and management issues and bioenergy literacy for students at all levels through a targeted Education (Task 4) program Teachers selected to participate in the Lead Teacher program in Year 1 will gain scientific and pedagogical knowledge related to bioenergy that can be transferred to their classrooms. Middle and high school students targeted through this program will learn about a locally relevant topic that builds interdisciplinary knowledge and possibly interest and motivation for science careers. 5. Providing useful practical and timely information to communities and stakeholder groups on all aspects of a potential beetle-kill bioenergy industry through Extension and Outreach (Task 5) The Extension team has presented an introduction to the BANR project to several interested community groups (see Presentations). Additionally, the team is developing informational fact sheets to be made available to stakeholders in Year 1 addressing topics such as potential forest biomass sources, biomass conversion technology, and the existing science regarding the role of woody debris in ecosystems and impacts of harvesting this material. 6. Understanding and incorporating the concerns of communities regarding the Health & Safety (Task 6) of biofuel and biochar production and distribution The Health & Safety team did not have any formal deliverables planned for Year 1. However, the preliminary literature review work will facilitate scoping and planning activities for work to be undertaken in subsequent years of the project.

Publications

  • Type: Other Status: Other Year Published: 2014 Citation: Kolb, P. 2014. An overview of the Bioenergy Alliance Network of the Rockies. Presented to three organizations: Montana Tree Farm Program, Montana Forest Owners Association, and Montana Forest Council.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Other Year Published: 2014 Citation: Paustian, K. 2014. Beetlejuice  Researching Sustainable Biofuels from Beetle-Kill Wood in the Rockies. Northwest Wood-Based Biofuels + Co-Products Conference. Apr. 28-30, 2014, Seattle, WA.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Other Year Published: 2014 Citation: Vorster, A., A. Sidder. 2014. Applying Geospatial Modeling Strategies for Detection of Mountain Pine Beetle Mortality in the Central Rocky Mountains using NASA Earth Observing System. Front Range Student Ecology Symposium. February 19, 2014, Fort Collins, Colorado.
  • Type: Conference Papers and Presentations Status: Other Year Published: 2014 Citation: Vorster, A. 2014. Applying Geospatial Modeling Strategies for Detection of Mountain Pine Beetle Mortality in the Central Rocky Mountains using NASA Earth Observing System. Colorado Bark Beetle Cooperative Quarterly Meeting. January 17, 2014, Breckenridge, Colorado.