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from the apparently-the-coca-plant-doesn't-count dept.
Scientists have confirmed that Miscanthus, long speculated to be the top biofuel producer, yields more than twice as much as switchgrass in the U.S. using an open-source bioenergy crop database gaining traction in plant science, climate change, and ecology research.
"To understand yield trends and variation across the country for our major food crops, extensive databases are available—notably those provided by the USDA Statistical Service," said lead author Stephen Long, Gutgsell Endowed Professor of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois. "But there was nowhere to go if you wanted to know about biomass crops, particularly those that have no food value such as Miscanthus, switchgrass, willow trees, etc."
To fill this gap, researchers at the Energy Biosciences Institute at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology created BETYdb, an open-source repository for physiological and yield data that facilitates bioenergy research. The goal of this database is not only to store the data but to make the data widely available and usable.
"In addition to providing an easy-to-use, web-based interface, the database supports automated data collection and big data analysis," said first author David LeBauer, a research scientist at Illinois. "Today the BETYdb database contains more than 40,000 open-access records.By making all of this data open access, we hope that researchers can identify new plants and best practices for biomass production. We've been using these data not only to summarize what has been observed in field trials, but also to identify new crops and predict productivity in new environments."
More Information can be found at Global Change Biology Bioenergy, DOI: 10.1111/gcbb.12420
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday January 08 2017, @11:57PM
Wind solar and hydro "feed the grid" - not as convenient as liquid fuel when you want to run a conventional vehicle like a truck or a ship, but good enough for trains...
Evils of hydro: it consumes dry land, usually fertile and populated dry land, but always floods an area that used to be not underwater. In areas that need a cushion in their fresh water supply, it's less evil, but often it is consuming good farmland and established towns/culture in exchange for electricity - then you can get into the ecological changes of transforming established flowing river ecologies into a stagnant lake ecologies - maybe you can stock the lake with trout, maybe not - either way it's taking biodiversity that developed over thousands to millions of years and replacing it with a radically different base ecosystem that's more or less starting from scratch with a handful of pioneer species. Oh, and eco-nutjobs hate dams too, to the point that they're getting many of them de-commissioned, so they must be pretty annoying eco-nutjobs to pull that off.
Biofuels are basically solar power converted to chemical storage - and I'd much rather develop them than solar panels and wind turbines that are labor and resource intense to install, maintain, and connect to a grid infrastructure to charge batteries and other inefficient NIMBY nonsense.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 09 2017, @04:48AM
> Evils of hydro: it consumes dry land...
A big dam and artificial lake are true in many hydro installations, but not all. For example Niagara Falls hydro just takes water from above the Falls. There is a small pond that stores water overnight (the falls almost stops when tourists are gone) and then is used to make power during the day.