Abstract
Biomass and bioenergy play a central role in Europe’s Green Transition. Currently, biomass is representing half of the renewable energy sources used. While the role of renewables in the energy mix is undisputed, there have been many controversial discussions on the use of biomass for energy due to the “food versus fuel” debate. Using previously underutilized lands for bioenergy is one possibility to prevent this discussion. This study supports the attempts to increase biomass for bioenergy through the provision of improved methods to identify underutilized lands in Europe. We employ advanced analysis methods based on time series modelling using Sentinel-2 (S2) data from 2017 to 2019 in order to distinguish utilized from underutilized land in twelve study areas in different bio-geographical regions (BGR) across Europe. The calculated parameters of the computed model function combined with temporal statistics were used to train a random forest classifier (RF). The achieved overall accuracies (OA) per study area vary between 80.25 and 96.76%, with confidence intervals (CI) ranging between 1.77% and 6.28% at a 95% confidence level. All in all, nearly 500,000 ha of underutilized land potentially available for agricultural bioenergy production were identified in this study, with the greatest amount mapped in Eastern Europe.
Highlights
We employ advanced analysis methods based on time series modelling using Sentinel-2 (S2) data from 2017 to 2019 in order to distinguish utilized from underutilized land in twelve study areas in different bio-geographical regions (BGR) across Europe
Since the size of area of interest” (AOI) differs significantly, it is difficult to draw any conclusions from the overall area of underutilized land expected in the individual BGRs or countries
Comparing this with results achieved by [19], where a minimum mapping unit (MMU) of 10 ha was used with Landsat 8 time series data, it can be deduced that a great amount of potentially underutilized lands mapped in this study could never have been detected with a lower resolution data
Summary
The IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming 1.5◦ highlights the importance of bioenergy “due to its multiple roles in decarbonizing energy” [3]. The IPCC report and the EU explicitly state that bioenergy should be produced in a sustainable manner at all levels along the entire value chain and must not affect agricultural or food systems, biodiversity and various other ecosystem functions and services [3,4]. One approach to prevent the food vs fuel competition is the use of contaminated, underutilized and/or marginal land that cannot be used for food or feed production but still retains the potential to produce biomass feedstock for bioenergy purposes [2,5,6]. Several studies concluded that using these lands for bioenergy production could have positive environmental and socio-economic impacts [7,8,9,10]
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