Dear colleagues,

I would like to forward a message regarding our recent paper on a global review of forest biomass harvesting guidelines. On behalf of all authors, I wish you a stimulating read!

With best wishes,

Viktor Bruckman

Good day,

A recently published, open-access review paper led by Dr. Brian Titus, research scientist from the Pacific Forestry Centre in Victoria, British Columbia, might be of interest to you:

Titus, B.D., Brown, K., Helmisaari, H-S., Vanguelova, E., Stupak, I., Evans, A., Clarke, N., Guidi, C., Bruckman, V. J., Varnagiryte-Kabasinskiene, I., Kęstutis Armolaitis, K., de Vries, W., Hirai, K., Kaarakka, L., Hogg, K., and Reece, P.  2021.  Sustainable forest biomass: a review of current residue harvesting guidelines.  Energy, Sustainability and Society 11:10, published on April 14, 2021.

Available at https://energsustainsoc.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13705-021-00281-w and DOI: 10.1186/s13705-021-00281-w

This topical review of forest biomass harvesting guidelines was completed by 16 authors from 11 countries, covering 43 jurisdictions in North America, Europe and Southeast Asia. Uniquely, the international team included information from guidelines from France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Lithuania and Japan that are not available in English - and hence may be of particular interest. (The review is an outcome of an OECD-sponsored workshop and thus relevant forest management manuals were reviewed in several cases where workshop participants were from jurisdictions that do not yet have specific forest biomass harvesting guidelines.) Below my signature is a list of authors and affiliations.

Of particular interest to some readers will be access to the raw data (i.e., consisting of direct quotations from original documents), included within a spreadsheet. This allows readers to explore the raw data and generate their own conclusions, or search for information relevant to their own interests, be this scientific research, policy-oriented questions, guideline development, forest management ideas, or any other topics of relevance to them. It is an aspiration of the authors that the spreadsheet of data be a publicly available "living" or "evergreen" document (courtesy of the Forest Stewards Guild) that can be updated or corrected as new guidelines are published – directions for contacting the Guild are in the spreadsheet. If you have general queries, please contact me and I will forward your message to Dr. Titus; if you notice errors or omissions in the raw data in the spreadsheet, or if you are aware of specific forest biomass guidelines that have inadvertently been overlooked, please contact Zander Evans or Inge Stupak - their contact information is in the main spreadsheet.

The review also contains a second spreadsheet with recommendations from past guideline reviews - to "give credit where credit is due", give readers direct access to exactly what past reviewers said, and to show how past recommendations were summarized by authors. As with raw guideline data, it is the hope of the authors that especially agencies developing their own guidelines will find this format helpful to their work.

A "blog" on this review for readers of the range of BMC (Biomed Central) journals may be of interest to you, or useful for sharing information about this paper with a general audience. “Helping ensure that forest bioenergy is environmentally sustainable” can be found at

http://blogs.biomedcentral.com/on-physicalsciences/2021/04/15/forest-bioenergy-sustainable/

Finally, please note that this review paper is part of a special issue of ESSO on Governing sustainability of bioenergy, biomaterial and bioproduct supply chains from forest and agricultural landscapes, edited by Inge Stupak, Tat Smith and Nicholas Clarke. This issue may contain related articles of interest to you regarding sustainability and governance mechanisms for forest bioenergy. The open-access issue is available at https://www.biomedcentral.com/collections/sbbb

I hope you enjoy this comprehensive and timely review, and find it adds value to your work.  I look forward to receiving your feedback.

Kind regards,

Winnifred Hays-Byl

Director, Forest Innovation and Dynamics

Pacific Forestry Centre, Natural Resources Canada

Email: winnifred.hays-byl@canada.ca

Cell:  778-535-4182

Authors:

•             Brian Titus, Natural Resources Canada, Victoria, BC, Canada (now retired)

•             Kevin Brown, Natural Resources Canada, Victoria, BC, Canada (now at K.R. Brown and Associates)

•             Heljä-Sisko Helmisaari, University of Helsinki, Finland

•             Elena Vanguelova, Forest Research, Surrey, UK

•             Inge Stupak, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

•             Alexander Evans, Forest Stewards Guild, New Mexico, USA

•             Nicholas Clarke, Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research, Norway

•             Claudia Guidi, Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, Switzerland

•             Viktor J. Bruckman, Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), Austria

•             Iveta Varnagiryte-Kabasinskiene, Lithuanian Research Centre for Agriculture and Forestry, Lithuania

•             Kęstutis Armolaitis, Lithuanian Research Centre for Agriculture and Forestry, Lithuania

•             Wim de Vries, Wageningen University and Research, the Netherlands

•             Keizo Hirai, Forestry and Forest Products Research Institute, Japan

•             Lilli Kaarakka, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA, USA

•             Karen Hogg, Natural Resources Canada, Victoria, BC, Canada

•             Pam Reece, Natural Resources Canada, Victoria, BC, Canada (now at Stantec, Sidney, BC)

Dr. Viktor Bruckman

Austrian Academy of Sciences

Dr. Ignaz Seipel-Platz 2

1010 Vienna, Austria

Voice: +43-1-51581-3200

Mobile: +43 664 6127259

Email: viktor.bruckman@oeaw.ac.at

Web: http://www.oeaw.ac.at/kioes/