A semi‐commercial case study of willow biomass production in the northeastern United States

Montes, Felipe; Fabio, Eric S.; Smart, Lawrence B.; Richard, Tom L.; Añó, Rodrigo Masip; Kemanian, Armen R.

doi:10.1002/agj2.20603

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…If typical agricultural equipment were unavailable, hand‐gathering using available vehicles, tools, and collection containers would be necessary. From a research perspective, lignocellulosic biomass, e.g., willow chips, can be obtained through agricultural research plots where plants are grown at large scales (Montes et al., 2021). Other potential sources of lignocellulosic biomass for research include harvesting (with permission) from public or private lands.…”

Section: Strategic Planningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preparation and Compositional Analysis of Lignocellulosic Plant Biomass as a Precursor for Food Production During Food Crises

Mather,

Siva,

Jauregui

et al. 2024

Current Protocols

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In the event of a sunlight‐blocking, temperature‐lowering global catastrophe, such as a global nuclear war, super‐volcano eruption or large asteroid strike, normal agricultural practices would be severely disrupted with a devastating impact on the global food supply. Despite the improbability of such an occurrence, it is prudent to consider how to sustain the surviving population following a global catastrophe until normal weather and climate patterns resume. Additionally, the ongoing challenges posed by climate change, droughts, flooding, soil salinization, and famine highlight the importance of developing food systems with resilient inputs such as lignocellulosic biomass. With its high proportion of cellulose, the abundant lignocellulosic biomass found across the Earth's land surfaces could be a source of energy and nutrition, but it would first need to be converted into foods. To understand the potential of lignocellulosic biomass to provide energy and nutrition to humans in post‐catastrophic and other food crisis scenarios, compositional analyses should be completed to gauge the amount of energy (soluble sugars) and other macronutrients (protein and lipids) that might be available and the level of difficulty in extracting them. Suitable preparation of the lignocellulosic biomass is critical to achieve consistent and comparable results from these analyses. Here we describe a compilation of protocols to prepare lignocellulosic biomass and analyze its composition to understand its potential as a precursor to produce post‐catastrophic foods which are those that could be foraged, grown, or produced under the new climate conditions to supplement reduced availability of traditional foods. These foods have sometimes been referred to in the literature as emergency, alternate, or resilient foods. © 2024 The Authors. Current Protocols published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.Basic Protocol 1: Convection oven drying (1 to 2 days)Alternate Protocol 1: Air‐drying (2 to 3 days)Alternate Protocol 2: Lyophilization (1 to 4 days)Support Protocol 1: Milling plant biomassSupport Protocol 2: Measuring moisture contentBasic Protocol 2: Cellulose determinationBasic Protocol 3: Lignin determinationBasic Protocol 4: Crude protein content by total nitrogenBasic Protocol 5: Crude fat determination via soxtec extraction systemBasic Protocol 6: Sugars by HPLCBasic Protocol 7: Ash content

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Section: Strategic Planningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preparation and Compositional Analysis of Lignocellulosic Plant Biomass as a Precursor for Food Production During Food Crises

Mather,

Siva,

Jauregui

et al. 2024

Current Protocols

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“…Introduced willows are most commonly used in SRC plantations in the northeastern United States [33,34]. It is imperative to study the possible consequences of increasing biomass production using introduced willows and its effect on biodiversity [35].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Attraction of Bees to Native and Introduced Willows (Salix spp.)

Grandstaff

Kuzovkina

Legrand

2023

Forests

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Introduced willows have mostly been employed as a renewable feedstock for bioenergy in the northeastern USA. The question of whether introduced willows provide the same biodiversity value and attractiveness as native willows has not yet been explored. The objective of this study was to compare the attractiveness of native and introduced willows to different subfamilies of bees. The common garden experiment planted at Storrs, CT, USA, included three native (S. eriocephala, S. sericea, S. lucida) and three introduced (S. ‘SX64’, S. ‘Onondaga’, S. ‘S365’) willows. Various willow taxa flowered at different times through spring, allowing pollinators to be collected over a 6-week period using colored bowl traps. As a result, 2430 bees were collected and identified to the subfamily level. Andreninae was the most prevalent pollinator visiting all taxa of willows, followed by Hylaeinae and Colletinae. There were no significant differences in the number of pollinators collected from either native or introduced taxa during the progressive willow flowering during mid-March–May of 2021 and 2022, suggesting their equal attractiveness to pollinators. Similarly, during the concurrent flowering of the two native and two introduced taxa, there were no significant differences in the number of pollinators associated with either group suggesting that when pollinators had foraging choices, they were similarly attracted to both native and introduced willows. The overall finding of this study suggested that plantings of either native or introduced willows to meet bioenergy goals offer similar benefits of floral resources for pollinators.

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