Which proportion of the branch biomass in a forest (e.g. predicted by allometric equations) is technically harvestable (can be extracted) with reasonable effort?
Hard data seems difficult to obtain for this question.
(Please exclude nutrient related issues from the answer.)
Guess the forest type should play a certain but not major role for the harvestable proportion. I'm most interested in pine and eucalypt plantations (10to 20 years). The background is bioenergy production from residues. So the quality of the biomass collected should meet that standards (not too much silicates).
I have a review article about the topic for Industrial pine plantations on my page from 2009, but you may not be satisfied because I don't have allometric equations. I don't recall there being a paper on your specific request. How much biomass you recover would depend on where it was collected in the system. You could get a lot raking it all up after a harvest, but at great expense for low quality. There is a lot of research from the late 70's early 80's about this approach not cited in my paper. Now I think you'd get the slash from whole tree harvesting. Again, the quality would be driven by the harvesting methods, the amount recovered, and whether the bole was being chipped as well, or just the tops and branches.
Not the answer you seek, but maybe i'll get to see some new ideas following this question too.
Here is a set of guidelines for the southeast U.S., which is mainly pine, on biomass retention on these sites. If you are interested in looking at this from a greenhouse gas balance the UK just released a study looking at 30 or so differnt scenarios where the biomass was going into pellets - https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/life-cycle-impacts-of-biomass-electricity-in-2020.Finally, chapter 3 of the Billion Ton Update study explains the process and parameters used to estimate biomass supply from forests in the US and it included costs related to collecting biomass as well - http://www1.eere.energy.gov/bioenergy/pdfs/billion_ton_update.pdf
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