Simulated bioenergy crop yield on agricultural land in a 10-county region of western North Carolina.

We used a mechanistic plant growth model, ALMANAC (Kiniry 1996), to simulate the growth of bioenergy crops including switchgrass, miscanthus, and hybrid poplar. We selected simulation points by overlaying SSURGO soil data polygons with a 1-km resolution observed climate dataset (Thornton et al. 2012). The centroid of each unique soil polygon and climate cell combination was used as a simulation point, resulting in over 69,000 simulation points. Crop growth was simulated at each point for 10 (grasses) or 12 (poplar) years and replicated 10 times. We limited our simulation to area currently identified as agriculture, pasture, grass- or shrubland in the 2012 National Cropdata Layer.