Research Information System
BIORESOURCES, vol.9, no.3, pp.4076-4093, 2014 (SCI-Expanded)
One of the major steps in setting up a bioenergy utilization system is to determine the potential availability of forest biomass. This study illustrates the methodology of estimating the spatial availability of primary forest residues in naturally occurring brutian pine forests, which are considerable components of forest biomass. A spatial database system was created to respectively calculate the theoretical, technical, and spatially economical biomass potentials that were subject to limitation by stand ages, forest functions, site indexes, slopes, and distance zones. To quantify primary forest residues (PFR), the conversion rates were processed, ranging from 24.1% to 26% of allowable cut volume for early thinning, 15 to 20% for thinning, and 11.1% for final felling. The results showed that the total accumulation of theoretical primary forest residues was 86,554.7 green tons in 10 years' time, 71% of which could be ecologically available. Furthermore, the spatially available biomass potential was 6,095.4 tons per year within a radial distance of 30 km. In the future, the proposed hierarchical process can be applied to brutian pine stands in the Mediterranean region using a larger dataset that will provide a truer representation of the regional variation.