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The supporting information of the journal article "Evaluation of sugar feedstocks for bio-based chemicals: A consequential, regionalized life cycle assessment" from Fabbri et al. (2022) includes one file with the following content: S1 Details of consequential modelling: feedstock S1.1 Identification type of changes (demand or supply) S1.2 Identification of constrains in the market S1.3 Identification of product substitutions S1.4 Identification of affected production technology S1.5 Identification of marginal crop and marginal supplier S2 Details of consequential modelling: by-products S3 Model parameters and unit processes S3.1 Sugar beet S3.2 Sugar cane S3.3 Wheat S3.4 Maize S3.5 Wood S3.6 Residual woodchips and sawdust S4 Review of land use change accounting methods S4.1 Direct land use change (dLUC) S4.2. Indirect land use change (iLUC) S5 Additional results S5.1 Influence of spatial differentiation in LCIA S5.2 Influence of indirect land use change (iLUC) S6 References This work was funded by the Innovation Fund Denmark under the Grand Solutions instrument; project ReMEG "Renewable Mono Ethylene Glycol for PET Plastic".

1. Increased anthropogenic influence on the environment has accentuated the need to assess how climate and other environmental factors drive vital rates and population dynamics of different types of organisms. However, to allow distinction between effects of multiple correlated variables, and to capture the effects of rare and extreme climatic conditions, studies extending over decades are often necessary. 2. In this study we used an individual-based dataset collected in three populations of Pulsatilla vulgaris subsp. gotlandica during 34 years, to explore the effects of variation in precipitation and temperature on vital rates and population dynamics. 3. Most of the observed conspicuous variation in flowering among years was associated with differences in precipitation and temperature in the previous summer and autumn with a higher incidence of flowering following summers with high precipitation and low temperatures. In contrast, climatic variables had no significant effects on individual growth or survival. 4. Although the weather-driven variation in flowering had only moderate absolute effects on the population growth rate, simulated persistent changes in average precipitation and temperature resulted in considerable reductions in population sizes compared with current conditions. Analyses carried out with with subsets of data consisting of 5 and 10 years yielded results that strongly deviated from those based on the full data set. 5. Synthesis: The results of this study illustrate the importance of long-term demographic monitoring to identify key climatic variables affecting vital rates and driving population dynamics in long-lived organisms.

ABSTRACT Fungi and fungal enzymes play important roles in the new bioeconomy. Enzymes from filamentous fungi can unlock the potential of recalcitrant lignocellulose structures of plant cell walls as a new resource, and fungi such as yeast can produce bioethanol from the sugars released after enzyme treatment. Such processes reflect inherent characteristics of the fungal way of life, namely, that fungi as heterotrophic organisms must break down complex carbon structures of organic materials to satisfy their need for carbon and nitrogen for growth and reproduction. This chapter describes major steps in the conversion of plant biomass to value-added products. These products provide a basis for substituting fossil-derived fuels, chemicals, and materials, as well as unlocking the biomass potential of the agricultural harvest to yield more food and feed. This article focuses on the mycological basis for the fungal contribution to biorefinery processes, which are instrumental for improved resource efficiency and central to the new bioeconomy. Which types of processes, inherent to fungal physiology and activities in nature, are exploited in the new industrial processes? Which families of the fungal kingdom and which types of fungal habitats and ecological specializations are hot spots for fungal biomass conversion? How can the best fungal enzymes be found and optimized for industrial use? How can they be produced most efficiently—in fungal expression hosts? How have industrial biotechnology and biomass conversion research contributed to mycology and environmental research? Future perspectives and approaches are listed, highlighting the importance of fungi in development of the bioeconomy.

Climate change and human activities are two major drivers of grasslands degradation. Understanding the vulnerability of grasslands to both drives is of great importance for grassland conservation. This research established a vulnerability assessment model with historical and future the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), which was predicted by an optimized spatiotemporal NDVI prediction model, and then examined the vulnerability of grasslands under climate change and human activities in Gannan Prefecture on the north-eastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Our results show that Gannan grasslands would show a vulnerability pattern of higher in the west and lower in the east under climate change and human activities. More than 46 % and 17 % of the region will become highly and medium vulnerable areas in the future, mainly concentrated in Maqu, Luqu and Xiahe counties in the west, southwest and northwest of Gannan. Specifically, the vulnerability is the lowest under the future climate scenario of moderate carbon emissions (i.e. RCP 4.5). Land use types such as forest land, unutilized land and cultivated land conversion to grassland could partially offset the vulnerability mainly caused climate change, while the conversion of grassland to unutilized land, forest land and cultivated land would increase the vulnerability of grassland. Our results would help to deepen the understanding of the patterns and main drivers of Gannan grasslands vulnerability under the impacts of climate change and human activities, and provide theoretical basis for the development of corresponding grassland management policies.

Significance Bioethanol produced from waste biomass from crops has the potential to provide a sustainable alternative to petroleum-based transportation fuel that does not compete with human food supply. The main obstacle to this approach is the resistance of this biomass to digestion. Thus, expensive energetic pretreatment and high enzyme inputs are needed to increase digestion. In this study, we screened a population of randomly mutated plants for digestibility with the aim of identifying novel factors that impact on this trait. We found a number of mutants with high digestibility and no impairments in growth or fitness. These mutants show a range of alterations in cell-wall composition, and we have mapped and characterized the mutant with the highest increase in digestibility.

Asseng, S. et al. Crop models are essential tools for assessing the threat of climate change to local and global food production1. Present models used to predict wheat grain yield are highly uncertain when simulating how crops respond to temperature2. Here we systematically tested 30 different wheat crop models of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project against field experiments in which growing season mean temperatures ranged from 15 °C to 32 °C, including experiments with artificial heating. Many models simulated yields well, but were less accurate at higher temperatures. The model ensemble median was consistently more accurate in simulating the crop temperature response than any single model, regardless of the input information used. Extrapolating the model ensemble temperature response indicates that warming is already slowing yield gains at a majority of wheat-growing locations. Global wheat production is estimated to fall by 6% for each °C of further temperature increase and become more variable over space and time. We thank the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project and its leaders C. Rosenzweig from NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University (USA), J. Jones from University of Florida (USA), J. Hatfield from United States Department of Agriculture (USA) and J. Antle from Oregon State University (USA) for support. We also thank M. Lopez from CIMMYT (Turkey), M. Usman Bashir from University of Agriculture, Faisalabad (Pakistan), S. Soufizadeh from Shahid Beheshti University (Iran), and J. Lorgeou and J-C. Deswarte from ARVALIS—Institut du Végétal (France) for assistance with selecting key locations and quantifying regional crop cultivars, anthesis and maturity dates and R. Raymundo for assistance with GIS. S.A. and D.C. received financial support from the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). C.S. was funded through USDA National Institute for Food and Agriculture award 32011-68002-30191. C.M. received financial support from the KULUNDA project (01LL0905L) and the FACCE MACSUR project (031A103B) funded through the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). F.E. received support from the FACCE MACSUR project (031A103B) funded through the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (2812ERA115) and E.E.R. was funded through the German Science Foundation (project EW 119/5-1). M.J. and J.E.O. were funded through the FACCE MACSUR project by the Danish Strategic Research Council. K.C.K. and C.N. were funded by the FACCE MACSUR project through the German Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL). F.T., T.P. and R.P.R. received financial support from FACCE MACSUR project funded through the Finnish Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MMM); F.T. was also funded through National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 41071030). C.B. was funded through the Helmholtz project ‘REKLIM—Regional Climate Change: Causes and Effects’ Topic 9: ‘Climate Change and Air Quality’. M.P.R. and P.D.A. received funding from the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS). G.O’L. was funded through the Australian Grains Research and Development Corporation and the Department of Environment and Primary Industries Victoria, Australia. R.C.I. was funded by Texas AgriLife Research, Texas A&M University. E.W. and Z.Z. were funded by CSIRO and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) through the research project ‘Advancing crop yield while reducing the use of water and nitrogen’ and by the CSIRO-MoE PhD Research Program. Peer reviewed

Livestock manure is a major source of the greenhouse gases (GHGs) methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O). The emissions can be mitigated by production of biogas through anaerobic digestion (AD) of manure, mostly together with other biowastes, which can substitute fossil energy and thereby reduce CO2 emissions and postdigestion GHG emissions. This paper presents GHG balances for manure and biowaste management as affected by AD for five Danish biogas scenarios in which pig and cattle slurry were codigested with one or more of the following biomasses: deep litter, straw, energy crops, slaughterhouse waste, grass–clover green manure, and household waste. The calculated effects of AD on the GHG balance of each scenario included fossil fuel substitution, energy use for transport, leakage of CH4 from biogas production plants, CH4 emissions during storage of animal manure and biowaste, N2O emissions from stored and field applied biomass, N2O emissions related to nitrate (NO3−) leaching and ammonia (NH3) losses, N2O emissions from cultivation of energy crops, and soil C sequestration. All scenarios caused significant reductions in GHG emissions. Most of the reductions resulted from fossil fuel substitution and reduced emissions of CH4 during storage of codigestates. The total reductions in GHG emissions ranged from 65 to 105 kg CO2-eq ton−1 biomass. This wide range showed the importance of biomass composition. Reductions were highest when straw and grass–clover were used as codigestates, whereas reductions per unit energy produced were highest when deep litter or deep litter plus energy crops were used. Potential effects of iLUC were ignored but may have a negative impact on the GHG balance when using energy crops, and this may potentially exceed the calculated positive climate impacts of biogas production. The ammonia emission potential of digestate applied in the field is higher than that from cattle slurry and pig slurry because of the higher pH of the digestate. This effect, and the higher content of TAN in digestate, resulted in increasing ammonia emissions at 0.14 to 0.3 kg NH3-N ton−1 biomass. Nitrate leaching was reduced in all scenarios and ranged from 0.04 to 0.45 kg NO3-N ton−1 biomass. In the scenario in which maize silage was introduced, the maize production increased leaching and almost negated the effect of AD. Methane leakage caused a 7% reduction in the positive climate impact for each percentage point of leakage in a manure-based biogas scenario.