Brian Wardlow, who leads the National Drought Mitigation Center's GIScience program, provided expert advice to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is conducting a lifecycle analysis on biofuels to comply with the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.
One of the questions Wardlow and other reviewers examined was whether it is possible to use satellite-derived data to characterize the spatial extent of land use/land cover (LULC) changes associated with increasing future biofuel demands and estimate the indirect impacts of such changes on the collective global carbon footprint, and greenhouse gas lifecycle.
Wardlow and other experts commented on the data and methodology used to produce country-level estimates of changes in LULC types and their influence on rates of carbon emission. A proposed methodology by Winrock International produced tables of carbon emission changes for countries around the world, from 2001 to 2004, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe.
Wardlow, whose research focuses on use of remote sensing data for LULC mapping, as well as drought monitoring and characterizing seasonal vegetation dynamics, said that he and the other reviewers helped the EPA determine whether they were using the best available data sets and methodology for this analysis. Such expert input is used to ensure the EPA has the ability to make sound, science-based decisions as mandated by the 2007 legislative act.
The other peer reviewers were Holly K. Gibbs, the David H. Smith Conservation Research Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University; Richard A. Houghton, Acting Director of The Woods Hole Research Center, in Massachusetts; Rattan Lal, Professor of Soil Science at The Ohio State University; and Jason A. Tullis, Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.
