production in terms of land quality and productive capacity.
Due to agricultural land abandonment in many Central
and Eastern Europe (CEE) countries, including Latvia, surplus
agricultural land could become available for bioenergy
production without compromising food production.
With the availability of GIS based data, there have been a
number of studies done involving spatial analysis of land
availability for bioenergy production.
The purpose of this study is to provide GIS based country level
estimate of geographically available agricultural lands,
which have been out of production for more than 2 years,
have not been converted into forest or urban areas, and are
suitable for SRWC production in Latvia. This study however,
does not include social, economic or technology related
factors, such as land owner attitudes and their values, potential
markets or availability of biomass facilities for SRWC
utilization.