Study cautions on sole focus on energy crop biomass yield; perennial grasslands deliver greater ecosystems services than corn A study by a team from the DOE’s Great Lakes Bioenergy Center has concluded that focusing on the yield of an energy crop alone can come at the expense of many other environmental benefits. The study, published as an open access paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), found that switchgrass and prairie plantings harbored significantly greater plant, methanotrophic bacteria, arthropod, and bird diversity than corn. Although the corn biomass yield was higher, all other ecosystem services, including methane consumption, pest suppression, pollination, and conservation of grassland birds, were higher in perennial grasslands. Agriculture is being challenged to provide food, and increasingly fuel, for an […]