Spatial variability of agricultural soil carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide fluxes: Characterization and recommendations from spatially high-resolution, multi-year dataset
Nakian Kim , Chunhwa Jang , Wendy H. Yang , Kaiyu Guan , Evan H. DeLucia , DoKyoung Lee
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引用次数: 0
Abstract
Mitigating agricultural soil greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can contribute to meeting the global climate goals. High spatial and temporal resolution, large-scale, and multi-year data are necessary to characterize and predict spatial patterns of soil GHG fluxes to establish well-informed mitigation strategies, but not many of such datasets are currently available. To address this gap in data we collected two years of in-season soil carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrous oxide (N2O) fluxes at high spatial resolution (7.4 sampling points ha−1) from three commercial sites in central Illinois, one conventionally managed continuous corn (2.8 ha in 2021; 5.4 ha in 2022) and two (one site 5.4 ha in 2021 and 2.0 ha in 2022, another site 2.7 ha both years) under conservation practices in corn-soybean rotations. At the field-scale, the spatial variability of CO2 was comparable across sites, years, and management practices, but N2O was on average 77 % more spatially variable in the conventionally managed site. Analysis of N2O hotspots revealed that although they represent a similar proportion of the sampling areas across sites (conventional: 12 %; conservation: 13 %), hotspot contribution to field-wide emission was greater in the conventional site than in the conservation sites (conventional: 51 %; conservation: 34 %). Also, the spatial patterns, especially hotspot locations, of both gases were inter-annually inconsistent, with hotspots rarely occurring in the same location. Overall, our result indicated that traditional field-scale monitoring with gas chambers may not be the optimal approach to detect GHG hotspots in row crop systems, due to the unpredictable spatial heterogeneity of management practices. Meanwhile, sensitivity analysis demonstrated that reliable (< 25 % error) field-scale soil GHG flux estimates are attainable when sampled above certain spatial resolutions (1.6 points ha−1 for CO2 and 5.6 points ha−1 for N2O in our dataset). Especially for N2O, lower spatial resolutions were prone to underestimating its field-wide flux.
期刊介绍:
Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment publishes scientific articles dealing with the interface between agroecosystems and the natural environment, specifically how agriculture influences the environment and how changes in that environment impact agroecosystems. Preference is given to papers from experimental and observational research at the field, system or landscape level, from studies that enhance our understanding of processes using data-based biophysical modelling, and papers that bridge scientific disciplines and integrate knowledge. All papers should be placed in an international or wide comparative context.