My research aims to address these issues of how best to remove atmospheric carbon dioxide. The main tools I use involve quantitative modeling to provide improved understanding of processes, and improved analyses of impact at both the regional and global scales. I apply these analyses to inform policy decisions about the impacts and most appropriate choices of technology, land use and land management, taking into account economic and environmental trade-offs and synergies, particularly between food security and climate-change mitigation. The main foci of my research in recent years have included soil carbon sequestration; restoration of degraded land; sustainable management of landscapes to integrate climate-smart agriculture, agroforestry, soil and water conservation, and reforestation with non-timber forest products; biochar; and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. My approaches to these systems have encompassed soil carbon modeling to better understand the processes underlying carbon stabilization; improved cost-effective and rigorous greenhouse gas inventories of national scale programs; techno-economic analysis of biomass conversion technologies; geospatial modeling and analysis of food-security interventions; and integrated assessment of biochar-bioenergy systems.
Selected Publications
View publications on Google Scholar.
Woolf, D., Solomon, D., & Lehmann, J. (2018). Land restoration in food security programmes: synergies with climate change mitigation. Climate Policy, 1-11.
Woolf, D., Cowie, A., Lehmann, J., Sohi, S., Whitman, T. & Cayuela, M. (2018). Biochar and climate change mitigation: Navigating from science to evidence based policy. Advances in Soil Science: Soil and Climate. (Ed. Lal, R.) Springer.
DeCiucies, S., Lehmann, J., Woolf, D., Whitman, T., & Enders, A. (2018). Priming mechanisms associated with pyrogenic organic matter additions to soil. Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. 238:329-342
Woolf, D., Lehmann, J, Joseph, S., Campbell, C. & Christo, F. (2017). An open source biomass pyrolysis reactor. Biofuels, Bioproducts & Biorefining,11: 945–954.
Woolf, D., Lehmann, J., & Lee D.R. (2016) Optimal bioenergy power generation for climate change mitigation with or without carbon sequestration. Nature Communications 7:13160.
Woolf, D., Milne, E., Easter, M., Jirka, S., DeGloria, S., Solomon, D., & Lehmann, J. (2015). Climate Change Mitigation Potential of Ethiopia’s Productive Safety-Net Program (PSNP). World Bank Report. Cornell University. https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/41296
Dharmakeerthi, S., Hanley, K., Whitman, T., Woolf, D., & Lehmann, J. (2015). Organic carbon dynamics in soils with pyrogenic organic matter that received plant residue additions over seven years. Soil Biology and Biochemistry 88, 268-274.
Cowie, A., Woolf, D., Gaunt, J., Brandao, M., & de la Rosa, R. (2014). Biochar, Carbon Accounting and Climate Change, in Lehmann, J. and Joseph, S. (Eds.), Biochar for Environmental Management II.
Woolf, D., Lehmann, J., Fisher, E. M., & Angenent, L. T. (2014). Biofuels from pyrolysis in perspective: trade-offs between energy yields and soil-carbon additions. Environmental science & technology, 48(11), 6492-6499.
Shabangu, S., Woolf, D., Fisher, E. M., Angenent, L. T., & Lehmann, J. (2014). Techno-economic assessment of biomass slow pyrolysis into different biochar and methanol concepts. Fuel, 117(Part A) 742–748.
Woolf, D., & Lehmann, J. (2012). Modeling the long-term response to positive and negative priming of soil organic carbon by black carbon. Biogeochemistry, 111(1–3), 83-95.
Woolf, D., Amonette, J. E., Street-Perrott, F. A., Lehmann, J., & Joseph, S. (2010). Sustainable biochar to mitigate global climate change. Nature Communications, 1(5), 1–9.
