http://biofuels-news.com/display_news/11623/us_scientists_maintain_that_miscanthus_is_24_times_more_productive_than_switchgrass/
January 6, 2017
US scientists maintain that miscanthus is ‘2.4 times more productive’
than switchgrass
US researchers have maintained that miscanthus, long speculated to be
the top biofuel producer, yields more than twice as much as switchgrass
in the US using an open-source bioenergy crop database gaining traction
in plant science, climate change, and ecology research.
"To understand yield trends and variation across the country for our
major food crops, extensive databases are available — notably those
provided by the USDA Statistical Service," said lead author Stephen
Long, Gutgsell professor of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences at the
University of Illinois.
He added: "But there was nowhere to go if you wanted to know about
biomass crops, particularly those that have no food value such as
miscanthus, switchgrass, willow trees, etc."
To fill this gap, researchers at the Energy Biosciences Institute at the
Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology created BETYdb, an
open-source repository for physiological and yield data that facilitates
bioenergy research. The goal of this database is not only to store the
data but to make the data widely available and usable.
‘Easy-to-use’
"In addition to providing an easy-to-use, web-based interface, the
database supports automated data collection and big data analysis," said
first author David LeBauer, a research scientist at Illinois.
He added: "Today the BETYdb database contains more than 40,000
open-access records. By making all of this data open access, we hope
that researchers can identify new plants and best practices for biomass
production. We've been using these data not only to summarise what has
been observed in field trials, but also to identify new crops and
predict productivity in new environments."
To demonstrate the database's value, researchers used BETYdb to
definitively establish that miscanthus is 2.4 times more productive than
switchgrass in the US under a wide range of environmental and management
conditions (e.g. fertilisation rates, stand ages, planting densities),
as reported in Global Change Biology Bioenergy.
"More than a decade of studies suggested that regardless of temperature,
water or nitrogen miscanthus, then grown only in Europe, would out yield
the North American favourite switchgrass by more than two-fold," Long said.
He added: "This was based on limited data and did not take into account
the breeding improvements in switchgrass that were occurring. Now that
miscanthus is grown in North America along with many improved cultivars
of switchgrass we wondered: does the remarkable two-fold difference in
yield still hold? And it does."