The objectives of the Integrated Midwest Biomass Resource Analysis project are to characterize and quantify the potential supply of biomass from energy crops in an 11 state area.
Energy crops are crops such as switch grass or poplar trees grown to produce fuels.
These files will used for transportation and economic analysis and modeling of energy crops. The Midwest Biomass Resource Analysis project is an effort to assess the feasibility of growing energy crops for fuel production. Energy crops are short rotation woody crops such as poplar trees and switch grass which can be grown to produce fuels. In this project, spatial data from various sources and in various formats were imported into, transferred between and manipulated in different software packages in order to obtain the desired output files. This paper addresses the challenges of formatting digital data, the need for and methods of transferring it between software packages and the various data manipulations necessary to obtain the desired output files.