Thomas Buchholz works as Senior Scientist at Spatial Informatics Group LLC and is a forest scientist by training. His expertise covers American and European forest-related bioenergy research, policy and economics, ecosystem service and sustainability assessments, and carbon accounting. In the course of his doctoral and post-doctoral research, Thomas has developed sustainability frameworks for bioenergy systems with substantive stakeholder inputs, and tested them on case studies in the US and abroad. His work is intended to contribute to a more elaborate approach to assess social, environmental, or economic costs and benefits associated with bioenergy systems - since such frameworks are needed to design future bioenergy systems and to assess existing bioenergy systems. With sustainability being a dynamic, indefinite and contested concept, stakeholder participation plays an important role in this work.