| There is considerable current interest in the use of woody biomass as a renewable, low carbon, and environmentally sustainable energy feedstock in the Northeastern United States. In order to be meaningful, sustainability must be explicitly defined in terms of specific ecosystem services desired by society. A willow life cycle assessment model shows that lifecycle fossil fuel demand and greenhouse gas emissions are low in comparison to fossil fuels. Uncertainty analysis, however, suggests that variability in the biological portion of the willow system significantly limits our ability to generalize regarding the performance of the system. An analysis of the impacts of harvesting on a suite of forest ecosystem services at three sites was used to infer the implications of harvesting biomass from standing forests as a source of feedstock in the region. Water regulating services, both flow and quality regulation, appear to be resilient in the face of harvesting. On the other hand, there appear to be tradeoffs between harvesting fiber and the services dependent on the regulation of forest growth, such as greenhouse gas mitigation and species composition. A questionnaire was used to assess how residents in the region perceived the importance of key ecosystem services. Although respondents attached high importance to all services, regulating and supporting services were seen as being more important than provisioning and cultural services. Females rated services as being more important than males. Additionally, education was a significant variable in understanding perceived importance of regulating services -- those with graduate degrees attached greater importance to these services. When ecosystem service analyses were weighted using the results of the importance survey, it appears that harvesting stands reduced the overall flow of ecosystem services as perceived by beneficiaries of those services -- primarily due to the loss of growth regulation services. As forests recovered, this value generally approached or exceeded pre-harvest conditions within ∼30 years. This timeline depends on the demography of beneficiaries. Those without college education generally perceived a greater overall flow of ecosystem services from all stands. Furthermore, in the eyes of these beneficiaries, overall service provision did not recover as fully or as quickly after harvest. |
