SSI Collaboration: Predicting biomass yield to enhance energy security and meet emissions targets
Professor Gail Taylor from the Centre for Biological Sciences at the University of Southampton is working with the Software Sustainability Institute in relation to improve the Forest Growth SRC project's scalability and usability to enhance energy security and meet emissions targets.
Read the full article by John Robinson on the Software Sustainability Institute's blog page.
Bioenergy crops have the potential to enhance energy security and help meet the required reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Bioenergy provides around one tenth of global primary energy (energy contained in raw fuels). Increasing this contribution is difficult with first generation biofuels, such as bioethanol and vegetable oil, because they compete with food crops for arable land. Second generation biofuels overcome this problem by using non-food biomass, such as woodchips, which grows on land not suitable for arable farming.
The Forest Growth SRC project have developed software that predicts the yield of biomass that can be grown in an particular area. They are working with the Software Sustainability Institute to improve the speed of execution and the ease of use of their software.... Read the full article here .
Further Details:
- Professor Gail Taylor TaylorLab website.
- Software Sustainability Institute (SSI) website .
- Energy at Southampton interdisciplinary website .
- Centre for Biological Sciences website .
