Nitrous oxide (N₂O) emission characteristics of farmland (rice, wheat, and maize) based on different fertilization strategies

by Dingmu Hou, Xuanchen Meng, Mengting Qin, Ennan Zheng, Peng Chen, Fanxiang Meng, Chao Zhang

Fertilizer application is the basis for ensuring high yield, high quality and high efficiency of farmland. In order to meet the demand for food with the increasing of population, the application of nitrogen fertilizer will be further increased, which will lead to problems such as N₂O emission and nitrogen loss from farmland, it will easily deteriorate the soil and water environment of farmland, and will not conducive to the sustainable development of modern agriculture. However, optimizing fertilizer management is an important way to solve this problem. While, due to the differences in the study conditions (geographical location, environmental conditions, experimental design, etc.), leading to the results obtained in the literatures about the N₂O emission with different nitrogen fertilizer application strategies have significant differences, which requiring further comprehensive quantitative analysis. Therefore, we analyzed the effects of nitrogen fertilizer application strategies (different fertilizer types and fertilizer application rates) on N₂O emissions from the fields (rice, wheat and maize) based on the Meta-analysis using 67 published studies (including 1289 comparisons). For the three crops, inorganic fertilizer application significantly increased on-farm N₂O emissions by 19.7–101.05% for all three; and organic fertilizer increased N₂O emissions by 28.16% and 69.44% in wheat and maize fields, respectively, but the application of organic fertilizer in rice field significantly reduced N₂O emissions by 58.1%. The results showed that overall, the application of inorganic fertilizers resulted in higher N₂O emissions from farmland compared to the application of organic fertilizers. In addition, in this study, the average annual temperature, annual precipitation, soil type, pH, soil total nitrogen content, soil organic carbon content, and soil bulk weight were used as the main influencing factors of N₂O emission under nitrogen fertilizer strategies, and the results of the study can provide a reference for the development of integrated management measures to control greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural soils.