Pan-European Mapping of Underutilized Land for Bioenergy Production

Abstract

This study aims at identifying underutilized land potentially suitable for bioenergy production in Europe by means of remote sensing time series analysis. The background is the Revised Renewable Energy Directive (REDII) requesting that 32% of Europe’s energy production shall come from renewable energy sources until 2030. In order to avoid the food versus fuel debate, we only considered land that has not been used in the previous five years. Satellite remote sensing is the only technique that allows for the assessment of the usage of land for such a long time span at the pan-European scale with reasonable efforts. We used Landsat 8 (L8) data for the full five year time period 2015–2019 and included additional Sentinel-2 (S2) data for 2018 and 2019. The analysis was based on a stratified approach for biogeographical regions and countries using Google Earth Engine. To our knowledge, this is the first work that employs high resolution time series data for pan-European mapping of underutilized land. The average patch size of underutilized land was found to be between 23.2 ha and 49.6 ha, depending on the biogeographical region. The results show an overall accuracy of more than 85% with a confidence interval (CI) of 1.55% at the 95% confidence level (CL). The classification suggests that at total of 5.3 million ha of underutilized land in Europe is potentially available for agricultural bioenergy production.

Viability and Sustainability Assessment of Bioenergy Value Chains on Underutilised Lands in the EU and Ukraine

“…The separate assessment for each biogeographical region is needed, as underutilised lands show significantly different properties depending on their climatic, elevation, and soil properties. For a detailed description of the applied approach to map underutilised lands, the reader is referred to Hirschmugl et al 2021 [36].…”

“…This may be in contrast to other findings [52,53], which included mountainous areas in the analysis, while in the BIOPLAT-EU project all steep slopes (>15 • ) as well as protected areas (Natura2000) and forests were excluded from the underutilised land map. More information on the accuracy of the underutilised mapping results can be found in Hirschmugl et al [36].…”

Energy from Biomass: Assessing Sustainability by Geoinformation Technology

“…The underutilized training data was generated based on a multitemporal assessment of areas within Google Earth using the LUCAS points to pinpoint possible locations. All details on the processing can be found in Hirschmugl et al (2021). The classification suggests that a total of 5.3 million ha of underutilized land in Europe are potentially available for agricultural bioenergy production.…”

Can the Biological Activity of Abandoned Soils Be Changed by the Growth of Paulownia elongata × Paulownia fortunei?—Preliminary Study on a Young Tree Plantation

“…In addition, the multifunctionality of agriculture is understood as the phenomenon that, in addition to the basic function of agriculture, which is the production of food products and other organic raw materials, generates additional income through the production of goods other than those traditionally associated with agricultural production [12][13][14]. The attractive strategy for farmers is recultivating abandoned agricultural lands, especially where biophysical conditions are favourable, and transforming them into sustainable and multifunctional bioenergy crops, assuring climate change mitigation, energy security, and increased economic opportunities [8,15]. In this regard, the cultivation of bioenergy trees/short rotation forestry have received great interest as a potential alternative to agri-food production, guiding the world towards a sustainable and circular bioeconomy [16][17][18].…”