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One of the main challenges to sustainable development of wood-based bioenergy is the difficulty in estimating long-term available and sustainable biomass supplies. Reliance on simple forest inventory and growth statistics can lead to a substantial overestimation of the sustainable level of woody biomass available within feasible transportation distances.

The Coordinated Resource Offering Protocol (CROP) was developed by Mater Engineering to assess potential long-term supply offerings from a variety of predominantly public landscapes across the country. To date the CROP has evaluated projected wood supply within a 50-120 mile radius of a given point proximal to one of 51 National Forests and 70 BLM districts. The Institute is actively seeking to evolve CROP as a biomass supply estimation tool by integrating a flexible environmental risk management decision support tool called DataBasin. The Conservation Biology Institute has developed DataBasin to spatially locate areas of high biodiversity value, sensitive soils, steep slopes, and other factors that would make certain stands unavailable as part of the biomass supply estimate. The resulting information will provide a far more accurate assessment of available, sustainable supply of woody biomass within range of a specific proposed biofuels facility, and help ensure a location and design capacity that will be environmentally sustainable and economically viable over the long term.

Working with the Conservation Biology Institute (CBI) the Pinchot Institute hopes to integrate the DataBasin modeling approach with the existing CROP evaluations and perform new CROP evaluations on the 68 remaining National Forests and surrounding BLM units to model potential sustainable supply across the majority of the federal land base. This project will provide greater accuracy in the estimates of available, sustainable supplies of woody biomass within the federal lands base, to help ensure the environmental sustainability and financial viability of biomass harvesting and utilization.
<be /> Current CROP results can be found at www.crop-usa.com.