This video outlines the role of Extension with BANR's outreach and community engagement efforts.

Extension and outreach efforts aim to provide useful, practical and timely information to communities and stakeholder groups on all aspects of a potential beetle-kill biofuel industry in the Rockies

Extension and Outreach

Reconciling new technology, such as biomass-to-fuel production, with local resources and social expectations can be both difficult and highly site-specific, as each community has different priorities and access to resources and infrastructure.  Extension and outreach efforts seek to engage local communities and existing infrastructure in the process of assessing available or underutilized forest resources, examining proposed and research based biomass conversion technologies, and collaborating in operational project development.  The first step is for extension personnel to provide useful, practical, and timely information to communities and stakeholder groups on all aspects of the BANR project and to help other task groups establish field sites and partnerships with selected local communities.  The second step will be to compile and assess stakeholder feedback and present this data to BANR research groups to ensure individual tasks are meeting stakeholder and resource needs, and the third step will be to disseminate project research results back to stakeholders in order to facilitate the applied implementation of the overall BANR project goals.

Reconciling new technology, such as biomass-to-fuel production, with local resources and social expectations can be difficult, because each community has different priorities. Our extension work will deliver results and tools developed through research and education, often in conjunction with already established programs in these communities. Extension delivery objectives include:

• Expanding the number and diversity of audiences that are exposed to the ecological, technical, economic, and social aspects of bioenergy production from beetle-killed wood, fire hazard reduction and other forest feedstocks

• Communicate the results of our research to landowners, resource managers and communities for application toward forest conservation and realistic investment opportunities and limitations of bioenergy utilization

• Compile and review university and entrepreneur efforts to develop woody biomass feedstock as a bioenergy such as the technologies that Cool Planet and other biomass-to-energy conversion programs (NARA program, Carbon Geo-tek, etc.) have

• Increase the adoption and coordination of extension delivery technology among the four states

• Leverage existing extension delivery capacities among the participating institutions including eExtension Initiative and the wood energy Community of Interest