Abstract
The USDA National Agricultural Library (NAL) maintains the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Commons, an open-access data repository. The LCA Commons supports the Federal LCA research community to advance LCA research through collaboration on matters of data transfer and access. NAL and USDA Forest Service (USFS) are collaborating to develop a consistent and repeatable workflow to systematically provide public access to life-cycle inventory (LCI) data for forestry and forest-based products. The workflow, which includes modeling, format conversion, and publication through the LCA Commons, must be demonstrated and documented so that researchers supporting the USFS LCA mission can publish data sets through the LCA Commons. NAL and USFS have collaborated to publish two unit processes for a distributed renewable energy production system, which NAL compiled into a product system model and published as a proof of concept for publishing a forestry data set. This proof of concept illustrates the scope of work required to efficiently publish data sets and assuring good data fidelity, and the functionality required of a full development-to-publication workflow. The proposed workflow document will become a standard reference for forestry LCI data submissions for the Forest Products Laboratory (FPL) in the future.
Keywords
life cycle inventory,
LCI,
database,
LCA Commons
Citation
Liang, Shaobo; Bergman, Richard; Gu, Hongmei. 2018. Workflow for publishing forestry LCI data through the LCA commons: a case study. Research Note FPL-RN-0364. Madison, WI: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory: p. 1-6.
