Biofuel Benefit or Bummer? A Review Comparing Environmental Effects, Economics, and Feasibility of North American Native Perennial Grass and Traditional Annual Row Crops When Used for Biofuel

Reduced nitrogen losses after conversion of row crop agriculture to perennial biofuel crops.

Current biofuel feedstock crops such as corn lead to large environmental losses of N through nitrate leaching and NO emissions; second-generation cellulosic crops have the potential to reduce these N losses. We measured N losses and cycling in establishing miscanthus (), switchgrass ( L. fertilized with 56 kg N ha yr), and mixed prairie, along with a corn ( L.)-corn-soybean [ (L.) Merr.] rotati...

Nitrogen Mineralization in Soils Used for Biofuel Crops

patterns and variations in native and non-native interlanguage pragmatic rating: effects of rater training, intercultural proficiency, and self-assessment

although there are studies on pragmatic assessment, to date, literature has been almost silent about native and non-native english raters’ criteria for the assessment of efl learners’ pragmatic performance. focusing on this topic, this study pursued four purposes. the first one was to find criteria for rating the speech acts of apology and refusal in l2 by native and non-native english teachers...

Agricultural and biofuel implications of a species diversity experiment with native perennial grassland plants

Two primary approaches to perennial biofuel crop production studied so far are fertilized grass monocultures and low-input high-diversity grasslands. While high-yielding perennial grass varieties are being developed in fertilized monocultures, breeding for yield in low-input high-diversity systems would be difficult. Before initiating breeding for low-input systems, it is therefore important to...

Transgenic perennial biofuel feedstocks and strategies for bioconfinement

163 10.4155/BFS.09.11 © 2010 Future Science Ltd Limitations in the current availability of bioenergy feedstocks are a major problem in next-generation biofuels. There are global economic, political and environmental pressures to increase biofuel production and utilization, to offset gasoline and diesel fuel use, especially in the transportation sector. Many countries, such as the USA and China,...