Ecosystem Land Use Modelling and Soil C Flux Trial (ELUM) - Land-use Change and the Bioenergy Crop Management Model Report.

The ELUM project was commissioned to provide greater understanding on the GHG and soil carbon changes arising as a result of direct land-use change (dLUC) to bioenergy crops, with a primary focus on the second-generation bioenergy crops Miscanthus, short rotation coppice (SRC) willow and short rotation forestry (SRF). The project was UK-bound, but with many outcomes which could be internationally relevant. Indirect land-use change impacts were out of scope. The aim of Work Package 4 (WP4) was to develop a bioenergy spatial modelling tool (ELUM software package) to allow non-specialist users to explore the consequences of land-use and land-management change arising from planting of energy crops on soil carbon and greenhouse gas emissions in the UK. This deliverable tests the accuracy of the ECOSSE model (from which the ELUM software package is derived) to simulate soil carbon and greenhouse gas fluxes, describes the uncertainties in the simulations and describes the ELUM meta-model itself. Finally, an extensive description of the meta-model is given in this report, describing assumptions and constraints, as well as the structure of the look-up table. The benefits and limitations of the look-up table approach for the meta-model are reported below. Benefits:Results are as reliable as possible, since results from the ECOSSE model are directly reported (except for non-default fertiliser and yield improvement)Comparatively fast to useFuture modifications are relatively straightforward, since results for different transitions, climates and regions, for example, can be obtained from the underlying model and used to create a new look-up table, without further modelling work to approximate the results of the ECOSSE modelLimitations:The data storage space for the meta-model is comparatively largeResults are restricted to those considered by the model (although use of regression equations for non-default options works around this).