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Evaluating the potential of legumes to mitigate N2O emissions from permanent grassland using process-based models

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posted on 2023-05-03, 18:21 authored by Kathrin Fuchs, Lutz Merbold, Nina Buchmann, Gianni Bellocchi, Marco Bindi, Lorenzo Brilli, Richard Conant, Val SnowVal Snow
A potential strategy for mitigating nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions from permanent grasslands is the partial substitution of fertilizer nitrogen (Nfert) with symbiotically fixed nitrogen (Nsymb) from legumes. The input of Nsymb reduces the energy costs of producing fertilizer and provides a supply of nitrogen (N) for plants that is more synchronous to plant demand than occasional fertilizer applications. Legumes have been promoted as a potential N2O mitigation strategy for grasslands, but evidence to support their efficacy is limited, partly due to the difficulty in conducting experiments across the large range of potential combinations of legume proportions and fertilizer N inputs. These experimental constraints can be overcome by biogeochemical models that can vary legume-fertilizer combinations and subsequently aid the design of targeted experiments. Using two variants each of two biogeochemical models (APSIM and DayCent), we tested the N2O mitigation potential and productivity of full factorial combinations of legume proportions and fertilizer rates for five temperate grassland sites across the globe. Both models showed that replacing fertilizer with legumes reduced N2O emissions without reducing productivity across a broad range of legume-fertilizer combinations. Although the models were consistent with the relative changes of N2O emissions compared to the baseline scenario (200 kg N ha−1 yr−1; no legumes), they predicted different levels of absolute N2O emissions and thus also of absolute N2O emission reductions; both were greater in DayCent than in APSIM. We recommend confirming these results with experimental studies assessing the effect of clover proportions in the range 30–50% and ≤150 kg N ha−1 yr−1 input as these were identified as best-bet climate smart agricultural practices.

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©2020. The Authors. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Language

  • English

Does this contain Māori information or data?

  • No

Publisher

American Geophysical Union

Journal title

Global Biogeochemical Cycles

ISSN

0886-6236

Citation

Fuchs, K., Merbold, L., Buchmann, N., Bellocchi, G., Bindi, M., Brilli, L., … Snow, V. (2020). Evaluating the potential of legumes to mitigate N2O emissions from permanent grassland using process-based models. Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 34(12), e2020GB006561. doi:10.1029/2020GB006561

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