• Kinne, B.
  
• Bonos, S.
  
• Cafferty, K.
  
• Ciolkosz, D.
  
• Jacobson, M.
  
• Kalavacharla, V.
  
• Kemanian, A.
  
• Langholtz, M.
  
• Leahy, J.
  
• Lindenfeld, L.
  
• Marrison, D.
  
• Murphy, D.
  
• Selfa, T.
  
• Smart, L.B.
  
• Spatari, S.
  
• Thomchick, E.
  
• Volk, T.
  
• Wang, J.
  
• Richard, T.L.
  

The Northeast Woody/Warm-Season Biomass (NEWBio) Consortium is in its second year of operations on a five year mission to lay the foundation for a sustainable bioenergy future for the Northeastern United States. NEWBio is a unique collaboration of public and private universities, businesses, non-profit organizations and government agencies, organized around a set of four large-scale demonstration sites where short-rotation woody crops and perennial grasses are grown on under-utilized or marginal lands, and where energy crops are integrated with conventional agricultural systems in a mutually supportive way. Our goals are to design, implement, analyze and evaluate robust, scalable, and sustainable value chains for lignocellulosic biomass suitable for advanced transportation fuels for our region.

The Northeast Woody/Warm-Season Biomass Consortium (NEWBio) launched its activities to build a sustainable biofuels supply chain in August 2012. NEWBio is providing the scientific and practical knowledge needed to design this sustainable future, is educating and engaging the entrepreneurs, employees, farmers, landowners, students, policy makers and citizens who will put that knowledge to work, and is supporting the commercial entities that have already developed in the region to facilitate their interactions to create successful feedstock production-to-biofuel systems. NEWBio employs a systems approach to address the broad societal, economic and ecological drivers that challenge the development of this biofuels infrastructure. Three technical thrusts are focused on (1) human systems, (2) plant production and genetics, and (3) harvest, preprocessing and logistics. Four integrating themes are concerned with sustainability systems and metrics, safety and health in biomass operations,  graduate and undergraduate education, and extension, outreach and technology transfer. NEWBio is designed to link the production of knowledge with effective communication, decisions, and implementation by understanding and incorporating stakeholder values and needs. This "knowledge to action" framework links our consortium partners with companies from throughout the value chain, from crop genetics to fuel use, as well as state and local agencies, industry associations, citizen groups and environmental and economic development organizations to create a culture of learning and opportunity.