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Miscanthus 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.

July 4, 2017  By BioEnergy Insight


“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.”

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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. | READ MORE.

 

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