Abstract
Abstract. The cultivation of bioenergy plants in fertile, arable lands increasingly results in new land use conflicts with food production and cannot be considered as sustainable. Marginal lands have been frequently considered as potential alternatives for producing bioenergy from biomass. However, clear definitions and assessment methods for selecting marginal lands and for calculating potentials are still widely missing. The project “SEEMLA” aims at triggering the exploitation of currently underused marginal lands for biomass production for energy purposes. Study sites have been selected in different European countries: Germany, Greece, and Ukraine. The selected sites represent a wide variety of different types of marginal lands. Based on a soil assessment set given by the Muencheberg Soil Quality Rating (SQR) system potentially “marginal” sites have been investigated. The SQR system allows for clearly distinguishing between soils of higher and lower quality. Soils with SQR scores below 40 are regarded as “marginal”. They can be classified into different groups with regard to the importance of soil hazard indicators as evaluated by the SQR approach. The calculated SQR scores correlate significantly with biomass yields of bioenergy plants. Further, the SQR method was adapted for use in a GIS study on marginal-land potentials in Europe. Thus, 46 % of the investigated European area could be classified as “marginal” with SQR scores below 40. From that area 22.6 % can be considered as potentially suitable for producing renewable resources after eliminating protected sites or other places not suitable for any kind of land use. Taking the ecological demands of selected bioenergy plants into account it is possible to give first preliminary recommendations for regional crop cultivation. It can be concluded that Europe offers a large potential for renewable resources from marginal sites. However, the implementation into practice is often impeded by missing or varying policies and regulations. A proper implementation needs clear regulations and also incentives for farmers at the European level.
Highlights
With an increasing competition between traditional agriculture for food and feed production and production of renewable resources for bioenergy or biomaterials, both unconventional land use systems as well as use unconventional land gain more and more attention in Europe and worldwide (Fischer et al, 2009; Popp et al, 2014; Rathmann et al, 2010)
The Soil Quality Rating (SQR) assessment of soil quality clearly shows that most of the selected marginal-land sites can be considered as “poor” or even “very poor”
With only one exception all final SQR scores are below the threshold of 40 (Fig. 4)
Summary
With an increasing competition between traditional agriculture for food and feed production and production of renewable resources for bioenergy or biomaterials, both unconventional land use systems as well as use unconventional land gain more and more attention in Europe and worldwide (Fischer et al, 2009; Popp et al, 2014; Rathmann et al, 2010). As part of a potential solution for this land use conflict, the utilization of lands which are not suitable for conventional high-productivity agriculture increasingly comes into focus Such lands are frequently addressed as “marginal land” or “surplus land” in recent scientific publications Shortall (2013) distinguishes between “land unsuitable for food production”, “ambiguous lower quality land” and “economically marginal land”. This approach addresses the causes of marginality more explicitly which are not uniform. They can be the result of land use changes due to technological or socio-economic transitions (Strijker, 2005) or related with poor natural prerequisites for agriculture. The latter is mainly connected with soil-inherent site properties which limit the productivity of crop production
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