Modeling the impacts of wood pellet demand on forest dynamics in southeastern United States

Abstract

The export of wood pellets from the southeastern United States (USA) has grown significantly in recent years, following rising demand from Europe. Increased wood pellet demand could lead to spatially variable changes in timberland management and area in the USA. This study presents an assessment of the impacts of increasing wood pellet demand (an additional 11.6 Mt by 2030) on land‐use dynamics, taking into account developments in other wood product markets as well as expected changes in other land uses. An economic model for the forest sector of the southeastern USA (SRTS) was linked to a land‐use change model (PLUC) to identify potential locations of land‐use change following scenarios of demand for pellets and other wood products. Projections show that in the absence of additional demand for wood pellets, natural timberland area is projected to decline by 450–15 000 km2 by 2030, mainly through urbanization and pine plantation establishment. Under the high wood pellet demand scenario, more (2000–7500 km2) natural timberland area is retained and more (8000–20 000 km2) pine plantation is established. Shifts from natural timberland to pine plantation occur predominantly in the Atlantic coastal region. Future work will assess the impact of projected transitions in natural timberland and pine plantations on biodiversity and carbon storage. This modeling framework can be applied for multiple scenarios and land‐use projections to identify locations of timberland area changes for the whole southeastern USA, thereby informing the debate about potential impacts of wood pellet demand on land‐use dynamics and environmental services. © 2017 The Authors. Biofuels, Bioproducts and Biorefining published by Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Impact of increased wood pellet demand on biodiversity in the south‐eastern United States

“…Land‐use projections were found to be most accurate for the land use types lowland hardwood forest, urban and cropland, and results were less accurate for mixed forest, natural and plantation pine forest, pasture and nonforest vegetation. The accuracy of PLUC is reduced with increasing spatial resolution, and sensitivity analyses indicated that PLUC output at a resolution higher than a county‐sized level is less accurate (Duden et al, ). This necessitated the aggregation of species richness index to a window size comparable to the average county in the study region (about 1,500 km 2 ), in order for the visualization of the results to be consistent with the uncertainty in the land‐use projections.…”

“…Rectangles symbolize maps, and the stack of rectangles symbolizes individual species habitat maps of 811 species included in the analysis. Arrows symbolize adaptations to the maps; 1) modelling of wood pellet demand scenarios using the economic wood market model SRTS and land‐use change model PLUC to create different land‐use projections up to 2030 (see Duden et al, ), 2) summing of species potential habitat maps taken from US‐GAP (McKerrow et al, ) to create maps of potential species richness and 3) spatial analysis using a moving window approach to create spatially explicit projections of species richness index up to 2030…”

“…In a previous study (Duden et al, ), we created land‐use maps for 2010 and 2030 under different scenario assumptions using a combination of the subregional timber supply (SRTS) model (Abt, Cubbage, & Pacheco, ) and the PCRaster Land‐Use Change (PLUC) model (Van der Hilst, Verstegen, Karssenberg, & Faaij, ; Verstegen, Karssenberg, Hilst, & Faaij, ). The scenarios consisted of four alternative trends of developments of wood markets (including wood pellets) in the south‐eastern United States, as well as projections of developments in different land‐use types.…”

“…Demand for wood feedstock from the south‐eastern United States for the US domestic housing market, the pulp and paper industry and the wood pellet sector in 2010 and as assumed in the four different scenarios (LhLp, LhHp, HhLp and HhHp) in 2030 (Duden et al, )…”

“…The sustainability of wood pellet production has been questioned and discussed extensively for several reasons including its potential contribution to changes in land use and forest management (Costanza, Abt, Mckerrow, & Collazo, 2015Duden et al, 2017;Prestemon & Abt, 2002) and impacts on biodiversity (Evans et al, 2013;Olesen, Kittler, Price, & Aguilar, 2016;Pelkmans et al, 2014;Tarr, Rubino, & Costanza, 2016). Land-use change and subsequent habitat loss have been the major cause of biodiversity loss in terrestrial ecosystems over the last 50 years (Millenium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005;Pimm & Raven, 2000; Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, 2010;WWF, 2012), and are projected to continue to drive biodiversity losses in the future (Jetz, Wilcove, & Dobson, 2007;Sala et al, 2000).…”