Preventing Biofuel Crops from Becoming Invaders

Bioenergy crop producers in the United States have been under scrutiny for promoting potentially invasive species as energy crops in trying to meet growing biofuel mandates. A recent paper published in Bioscience magazine has put this issue at the forefront and proposed ways to prevent biofuel crops in the pipeline from becoming noxious or invasive weeds that may inflict serious ecological and economic damage.

The paper titled Navigating the "Noxious" and "Invasive" Regulatory Landscape: Suggestions for Improved Regulation calls for a number of regulatory and industrial reforms to address the problem of invasiveness as a consequence of introducing or farming biofuel crops that have not been thoroughly evaluated. The paper recommends the updating of official noxious weed list for different production regions in the US in a manner that prevents the introduction of new or known invaders without undue restriction against low risk species along with the establishment or strengthening of Invasive Species Councils (ISC) that will develop objective and science-based weed risk assessment protocols. The report also endorses additional steps that industry should take before commercialization to prevent invasion such as subjecting their crops to thorough weed risk assessment, ensuring that plant traits in the breeding program are not associated with invasiveness, conducting field trials and providing data to the ISC.