Biomass resources and their bioenergy potential estimation: A review

Biomass and bioenergy potential estimation has been worldwide research highlights in renewable energy field to get comprehensive understand of bioenergy development, especially under the situation of energy crisis. This paper reviews the results of previous studies that investigated biomass resources and their bioenergy potential estimation. It is organized from the perspectives of traditional vs. newly-introduced approaches and present vs. future. First, according to the methods used in relative studies, existing studies were divided into two categories: statistical data based and RS-GIS based. Second, concerning about the future of bioenergy, biomass and bioenergy potential estimation under different scenarios in the future were also reviewed and summarized according to the dominant factor considered in simulation. At last, based on the reviews above, questions and the future of bioenergy potential estimation were proposed so as to provide some instructions for bioenergy development.