Purpose Geospatial details about land use are necessary to
assess its potential impacts on biodiversity. Geographic
information systems (GIS) are adept at modeling land use
in a spatially explicit manner, while life cycle assessment
(LCA) does not conventionally utilize geospatial information.
This study presents a proof-of-concept approach for
coupling GIS and LCA for biodiversity assessments of land
use and applies it to a case study of ethanol production
from agricultural crops in California.
Materials and methods GIS modeling was used to generate
crop production scenarios for corn and sugar beets that met
a range of ethanol production targets. The selected study
area was a four-county region in the southern San Joaquin
Valley of California, USA. The resulting land use maps
were translated into maps of habitat types. From these
maps, vectors were created that contained the total areas for
each habitat type in the study region. These habitat