The economic attractiveness of Short Rotation Coppice biomass plantations for bioenergy in Northern Ontario
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With an apparent abundance of idled and under-utilized agricultural land in Northern Ontario, there is interest in the ability of short-rotation forests to supply bioenergy and other possible bioproducts. Once established, Short Rotation Coppice (SRC) plantations can be harvested on (roughly) three-year cutting cycles until about age 22. Purpose-grown plantations such as these could be used as stand-alone sources of fibre or used in conjunction with sources such as natural forests or woody residues. Using a recently developed land cover model we found that approximately 405 500 ha of agricultural-type land exists across Northern Ontario. Numerous scenarios were developed to calculate SRC profitability on these areas. The analyses are intended to reflect a broad range of expectations on physical yields and prices, including management costs. Although SRC involves a considerable up-front investment, our simulations suggest a significant amount of land could have a break-even biomass price of $85/oven-dried tonnes (ODT) (+/- $5/ODT) at farm gate. This farm gate biomass price represents roughly current traditional biomass prices paid. Thus SRC would need to produce biomass at a comparable cost to be a competitive option. A number of technological and price changes could increase the attractiveness of SRC systems in Northern Ontario, including decreases in establishment and management costs (while maintaining yield expectations) and improved cultivars offering increased yields.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".