Achievement

The Yakama Nation manages their 1.2MM acre reservation to provide sustained cultural, economic, recreational and environmental benefits to tribal members. Our IGERT team worked collaboratively with a Tribal interdisciplinary team to assess the regional supply of biomass residues for a proposed combined heat and power facility. Remote sensing and field work were used to develop forest, agriculture, urban waste and invasive species biomass inventories. Spatially explicit GIS data were coupled to a transportation logistics and cost model to assess the scale of facility that was feasible. We show that the reservation can supply well over 100,000 bone dry tonnes of woody biomass residue annually on a sustainable basis. Combustion in the facility was shown to eliminate much of the air pollution associated with open burning of residues.