Sustainable harvesting of Danish wood resources for energy production
Conservation of carbon stores in forest soils is important in order to maintain the fertility of soils and to avoid emission of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. If bioenergy chips should be regarded as a renewable source of energy it is required that forest soils are not gradually depleted in carbon.
Title: Sustainable harvesting of Danish wood resources for energy production. Background: In the year 2000 the harvesting of comminuted wood fuel from mainly whole trees is estimated to cover one fourth of the total yearly Danish forest cut. A continous harvest of comminuted wood fuels in that size requires knowledge and regulations to be executed in a sustainable way. Onjectives: 1) To investigate the long term impact of the Danish chip-harvesting programme on the balance of carbon and nutrients in forest soils. 2) To develop guidelines for a sustainable utilization. Workplan: 1) Litterature survey 2) Field trials on the relation between whole tree chipping and the soil carbon 3) To produce guidelines for a sustainable continued utilization of whole tree chips harvesting in Danish forestry
The carbon store of forest soils is determined by input of organic matter and the rate of decomposition of organic matter. As the duration of decomposition is very long (>100 years), carbon stores of the soil changes only slowly due to altrerations in input and decomposition of organic matter. Possible influences of intensive exploitation of biomass therefore must be monitored over relatively long time. This is difficult to do within the time frame of a normal research project. However, it turned out to be possible to make use of some of the long-term experiments at DFLRI. The project work consists of three parts: 1) A literature review on the influence on soil C stores of intensive oxploitation of biomass from forest stands. 2) Evaluation of soil C stores in two 25-year-old field trials including the treatments whole-tree harvesting and conventional (stem only) harvesting at the end of rotation. 3) Application of model tools to predict changes in soil C stores and establishment of experiments to provide realistic input variables for use under Danish conditions. The literature review revealed that previous studies did not find a clear and strong effect of intensive harvesting. A few studies indicated decreasing soil C stores, at least temporarily, but the decline in C content tended to be small or inconsistent between different sites. Several of the studies also integrated little time (
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Contact
Hørsholm Kongevej 11
DK-2970 Hørsholm, Denmark
Heding, Niels (forskningsleder), 45763200, NIH@FSL.DK
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