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Facilitate a Reliable and Sustainable Supply of Biomass
![A rotation of pictures displaying forest scenes before and after vegetation treatments, woody biomass removal operations, and woody biomass processing.](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20120921181646im_/http://www.fs.fed.us/woodybiomass/strategy/images/rotation/image00.jpg)
Nutrient Cycling
Woody biomass provides important ecological functions such as soil organic matter, nutrient cycling, hydrological functioning, and coarse debris for wildlife habitat. These ecological factors must be considered when deciding what biomass is surplus and can be removed.
The Forest Service will fully use all existing authorities, including the Healthy Forest Initiative/Healthy Forests Restoration Act and stewardship contracting authority, to facilitate treatment, planning, and implementation to provide a long-term reliable and predictable supply of woody biomass from public and private lands. The Agency will develop estimates of woody biomass expected to be generated through vegetation management treatments. Actively engaging community, tribal, business, and environmental leaders in planning, execution, and monitoring is critical to success.
Select the subheadings below to expand or contract the lists of related links and documents, or you may Contract All or Expand All.
- FIA Biosum - explores the financial feasibility of landscape scale fuel treatments that reduce fire hazard, leave healthy and sustainable residual forests, and generate both wood products and sub-merchantable woody material suitable as feedstocks to biomass-to-energy generating stations.
- BioSAT (Biomass Site Assessment Tools) - a developing website, when completed, BioSAT will be a comprehensive web-based analytical dashboard for assessing supply chain cost and logistics for agricultural and forestry biomass for 33 Eastern States. The BioSAT system rapidly screens bio-sheds, logistics and sites cellulosic biomass collection or processing centers by zip-code tabulation area for the 33 Eastern States (Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wisconsin).
- Coordinated Resource Offering Protocol (CROP) - find additional sub-state assessments that are not included in the State Supply Links below.
- Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) National Program - reports on status and trends in forest area and location; in the species, size, and health of trees; in total tree growth, mortality, and removals by harvest; in wood production and utilization rates by various products; and in forest land ownership.
- Forest Products Measurement - coordinates biometric activities for the National Forests throughout the nation.
- Forest Vegetation Simulator - the USDA Forest Service's nationally supported framework for forest growth and yield modeling.
- My Fuel Treatment Planner - a user-friendly spreadsheet application that provides a way to think through options and questions and to calculate cost or net revenue of treatments and fuel surface loads following treatment.
- Using Financial Analysis to Assess the Feasibility of Implementation of Ecosystem Management - information about all aspects of operations involved in ecosystem management treatments needed to implement ecosystem management and to avoid the expense of preparing timber sales for which there are no buyers.
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