The Southeast Partnership for Integrated Biomass Supply Systems (IBSS) demonstrates real-world solutions towards economically and environmentally sustainable production and conversion of biomass-to-biofuel in the southeast United States (SE US). This Partnership is helping to meet the USDA goal of producing almost 50% of the next generation of biofuels in the SE US, while supporting robust and innovative research, education and extension activities. The Partnership has three overall goals:

1	Demonstrate implementable 'real-world' solutions that effectively address the economic and environmental barriers that currently limit sustainable and reliable biofuels production, while reducing deployment risks, lowering feedstock and conversion costs, and maximizing societal gains.
2	Develop, validate and utilize new tools and metrics for effective decision-making in the selection and deployment of biomass-to-biofuels production that addresses our national energy needs and revitalizes rural economies.
3	Provide creditable, impactful, and integrated education, extension and outreach (E2O) programs and communication tools that result in a well-trained workforce, and landowners, stakeholders and policy makers with the knowledge necessary to thoughtfully enable a biofuels industry.

This Partnership is uniquely positioned to leverage existing knowledge and feedstocks, to develop and demonstrate sustainable production scenarios that create innovative development solutions in leading conversion technologies. Research and development activities target specific economic and environmental barriers in each step of the supply chain, generating solutions that in combination demonstrate the approaches needed to launch a regional biofuels industry. The partnership uses system performance metrics to measure the economic and environmental sustainability progress of the work. These metrics will also be used by the E2O tasks to generate creditable, science-based data that can be used to inform the public discussion on the benefits and costs of sustainable biofuels.