title: Sustainable bioenergy production with little carbon debt in the Loess Plateau of China.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  As a key strategy for mitigating global climate change, bioenergy production by reducing CO2 emissions plays an important role in ensuring sustainable development. However, land-use change by converting natural ecosystems into energy crop field could create a carbon debt at the beginning. Thus, the potential carbon debt calculation is necessary for determining a promising bioenergy crop production, especially in the region rich of marginal land.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Here, we used high-resolution historical land-use data to identify the marginal land available and to evaluate the carbon debt of planting Miscanthus in the Loess Plateau, China. We found that there were 27.6 Mha for energy production and 9.7 Mha for ecological restoration, with total annual production of 0.41 billion tons of biomass. We also found that soil carbon sequestration and total CO2 mitigation were 9.3 Mt C year(-1) and 542 Mt year(-1), respectively. More importantly, the result showed that planting Miscanthus on marginal land in the Loess Plateau only took 0.97 years on average to repay the carbon debt.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our study demonstrated that Miscanthus production in suitable marginal land in the Loess Plateau can offer considerable renewable energy and mitigate climate change with little carbon debt. These results suggested that bioenergy production in the similar arid and semiarid region worldwide would contribute to carbon sequestration in the context of rapid climate change.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Systematic and Evolutionary Botany, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100093 China.
authors.forename: Wei
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Beijing Research Center for Information Technology in Agriculture, Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences, Beijing, 100097 China.
authors.forename: Cheng
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Peng
authors.affiliation: China Academy of Urban Planning and Design, Beijing, 100044 China.
authors.forename: Zhifen
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Institute of Geographical Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100101 China.
authors.forename: Yue
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Plant Germplasm Enhancement and Speciality Agriculture, Wuhan Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, 430074 Hubei China.
authors.forename: Juan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yan
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Plant Germplasm Enhancement and Speciality Agriculture, Wuhan Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, 430074 Hubei China.
authors.forename: Jianqiang
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Systematic and Evolutionary Botany, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100093 China.|Key Laboratory of Plant Resources and Beijing Botanical Garden, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100093 China.
authors.forename: Tao
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Sang
keywords: Bioenergy; Carbon debt; Climate change; Land-use change; Marginal land; Miscanthuslutarioriparius