Treesearch

Forest harvest residues can be a cost-effective feedstock for a biorefinery, but the high lignin content of forest residues is a major barrier for enzymatic sugar production. Sulfite pretreatment to overcome strong recalcitrance of lignocelluloses (SPORL) was applied to a Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii (Mirb) Franco var. menziesii) forest residue in a range of sulfite and acid loadings at 165
°C for 75 min with liquid to wood ratio of 3:1. Sodium bisulfite and sulfuric acid charge as mass fraction of oven dry biomass of 12% and 2.21%, respectively, was optimal in terms of enzymatic...

Thermochemical pretreatment of lignocellulose is crucial to bioconversion in the fields of biorefinery and biofuels. However, the enzyme inhibitors in pretreatment hydrolysate make solid substrate washing and hydrolysate detoxification indispensable prior to enzymatic hydrolysis. Sulfite pretreatment to overcome recalcitrance of lignocelluloses (SPORL) is a relatively new process, but has demonstrated robust performance for sugar and biofuel production from woody biomass in terms of yield and energy efficiency. This study demonstrated the advantage of SPORL pretreatment whereby the...

Fine-scale soil (SSURGO) data were processed at the county level for 37 states within the eastern United States, initially for use as predictor variables in a species distribution model called DISTRIB II. Values from county polygon files converted into a continuous 30-m raster grid were aggregated to 4-km cells and integrated with other environmental and site condition values for use in the DISTRIB II model. In an effort to improve the prediction accuracy of DISTRIB II over our earlier version of DISTRIB, fine-scale soil attributes replaced those derived from coarse-scale soil (STATSGO)...

The Kimble Creek abandoned coal mine site, located on Wayne National Forest in southeastern Ohio, is among several abandoned coal mine sites that have been responsible for the acid mine drainage (AMD) polluting ground and surface water. Materials released by AMD include iron, aluminum, manganese, other hazardous substances, and acidity that are harmful to aquatic life. We tested at the Kimble Creek site the Pyrolusite Process®, a microbiological water treatment system that employs metal-oxidizing bacteria adsorbed on limestone rocks. The pilot treatment plant constructed was inoculated...

South Carolina contains about 19.3 million acres of land area, less census water. The forest land area makes up 68 percent of the land area with 13.1 million acres. Commercial timberland area (land available for production of forest products) comprised >99 percent of the forest land area, or 13.0 million acres. The remaining 88,000 acres are reserved forest land where harvesting is prohibited by law (68,000 acres) and unproductive forest land not capable of producing at least 20 cubic feet per acre per year (20,000 acres).

Mountain pine beetle killed Lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta Douglas ex Loudon) wood chips were pretreated using an acidic sulfite solution of approximately pH = 2.0 at a liquor to wood ratio of 3 and sodium bisulfite loading of 8 wt % on wood. The combined hydrolysis factor (CHF), formulated from reaction kinetics, was used to design a scale-up pretreatment on 2000 g wood chips at a relatively low temperature of 165 °C that reduced furan formation and facilitated high solids saccharification and fermentation. The pretreated solids and liquor were disk milled together to result in a biomass...

The Fuel Characteristic Classification System (FCCS) is a software module that records wildland fuel characteristics and calculates potential fire behavior and hazard potentials based on input environmental variables. The FCCS 3.0 is housed within the Integrated Fuels Treatment Decision Support System (Joint Fire Science Program 2012). It can also be run from command line as a stand-alone calculator. The flexible design of FCCS allows users to represent the structural complexity and diversity of fuels created through natural processes (e.g., forest succession and disturbance) and management...

The U.S. Forest Service Forest Products Laboratory (FPL), located in Madison, Wisconsin, celebrated its centennial in 2010, and one of the lab’s signature research areas during this century of achievement has been lignocellulosic transportation fuels. Many of these research advances have occurred either during wartime emergencies or times of economic crisis. Although great progress has been made, commercial production of lignocellulosic fuels has been limited. In this paper, we take an indepth look at advances, breakthroughs, and motivating factors in liquid fuels research both at the FPL...

Damage from Sirococcus and Diplodia shoot blights of red pine is widespread and periodically severe in the Lake States. An outbreak of shoot blight occurred in red pine sapling plantations across northern Wisconsin, northern Minnesota, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in 1993. We established monitoring plots in red pine sapling plantations severely affected by shoot blight in Michigan and Wisconsin to assess the influence of residual overstory red pine and the presence of Sirococcus and Diplodia shoot blights on disease severity and their long-term impact on tree survival and growth....

To mitigate the loss of native tree species threatened by non-native pathogens, managers need to better understand the conservation status of remaining populations and the conditions that favor successful regeneration. Populations of Juglans cinerea L. (butternut), a wide-ranging riparian species, have been devastated by butternut canker, a disease caused by a non-native fungal pathogen. We assessed J. cinerea within Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP) to determine post-disease survivorship and health, recruitment history, environmental conditions associated with survival, and the...