Participative dendromass bioenergy modeling in regional dialogs with the open-source BEAST system

Abstract

Regional participative decision-making processes are becoming increasingly important in the context of climate change mitigation goals and renewable energy production. Dendromass bioenergy plays an important role in climate protection planning at the local and regional levels. The 'Bio-Energy Allocation and Scenario Tool' (BEAST) is a decision support system designed to assist in stakeholder dialogues, with the goal of developing scenarios of regional wood production through scenario quantification and visualization. While it incorporates wood from forests and outside of forests as bioenergy sources, its main application area is the spatial selection of preference sites for Short Rotation Coppices on arable land, based on the integration of ecological and economic assessments in a multi-criteria analysis with preference selection using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the purposes of the system, its simulation and software design, and also announces the system's availability as open-source software.