Best practices guidelines for managing water in bioenergy feedstock production

In the quest to develop renewable energy sources, woody and agricultural crops are being viewed as an important source of low environmental impact feedstocks for electrical generation and biofuels production (Hall and Scrase 1998, Eriksson et al. 2002, Somerville et al. 2010, Berndes and Smith 2013). In countries like the USA, the bioenergy feedstock potential is dominated by agriculture (73%) (Perlack et al. 2005). In others like Finland the largest potential comes from forest resources. Forest bioenergy operational activities encompass activities of a continuing and cyclical nature such as stand establishment, midrotation silviculture, harvesting, product transportation, wood storage, energy production, ash recycling, and then back to stand establishment (Neary 2013). All of these have the potential to produce varying levels of disturbance that might affect site quality and water resources but the frequency for any given site is low (Berndes 2002, Shepard 2006, Fargione et al. 2010, Neary and Koestner 2012). Agricultural production of feedstocks involves annual activities that have a much higher potential to affect soils and water resources.