title: Downgrading recent estimates of land available for biofuel production.
abstract: Recent estimates of additional land available for bioenergy production range from 320 to 1411 million ha. These estimates were generated from four scenarios regarding the types of land suitable for bioenergy production using coarse-resolution inputs of soil productivity, slope, climate, and land cover. In this paper, these maps of land availability were assessed using high-resolution satellite imagery. Samples from these maps were selected and crowdsourcing of Google Earth images was used to determine the type of land cover and the degree of human impact. Based on this sample, a set of rules was formulated to downward adjust the original estimates for each of the four scenarios that were previously used to generate the maps of land availability for bioenergy production. The adjusted land availability estimates range from 56 to 1035 million ha depending upon the scenario and the ruleset used when the sample is corrected for bias. Large forest areas not intended for biofuel production purposes were present in all scenarios. However, these numbers should not be considered as definitive estimates but should be used to highlight the uncertainty in attempting to quantify land availability for biofuel production when using coarse-resolution inputs with implications for further policy development.
authors: International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Ecosystem Services and Management Program, Schlossplatz 1, Laxenburg, A-2361, Austria. fritz@iiasa.ac.at
authors: Steffen
authors: S
authors: Fritz
authors: Linda
authors: L
authors: See
authors: Marijn
authors: M
authors: van der Velde
authors: Rachel A
authors: RA
authors: Nalepa
authors: Christoph
authors: C
authors: Perger
authors: Christian
authors: C
authors: Schill
authors: Ian
authors: I
authors: McCallum
authors: Dmitry
authors: D
authors: Schepaschenko
authors: Florian
authors: F
authors: Kraxner
authors: Ximing
authors: X
authors: Cai
authors: Xiao
authors: X
authors: Zhang
authors: Simone
authors: S
authors: Ortner
authors: Rubul
authors: R
authors: Hazarika
authors: Anna
authors: A
authors: Cipriani
authors: Carlos
authors: C
authors: Di Bella
authors: Ahmed H
authors: AH
authors: Rabia
authors: Alfredo
authors: A
authors: Garcia
authors: Mar'yana
authors: M
authors: Vakolyuk
authors: Kuleswar
authors: K
authors: Singha
authors: Maria E
authors: ME
authors: Beget
authors: Stefan
authors: S
authors: Erasmi
authors: Franziska
authors: F
authors: Albrecht
authors: Brian
authors: B
authors: Shaw
authors: Michael
authors: M
authors: Obersteiner
mesh_terms: D000383:Agriculture; D056804:Biofuels; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources; D006801:Humans; D015203:Reproducibility of Results
chemical_list: D056804:Biofuels