URBANA, Ill. — Farmers apply nitrogen fertilizers to crops to boost yields, feeding more people and livestock. But when there’s more fertilizer than the crop can take up, some of the excess can be converted into gaseous forms, including nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that traps nearly 300 times as much heat in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. About 70% of human-caused nitrous oxide comes from agricultural soils, so it’s vital to find ways to curb those emissions.
Before they can recommend practices to reduce nitrous oxide and other greenhouse gases from agricultural soils, scientists first have to understand where and when they are released. Sampling soil emissions is labor intensive and expensive, so most studies haven’t done extensive sampling over space and time. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign sought to change that, rigorously sampling nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide emissions from commercial corn and soybean fields under practical management scenarios over multiple years. Not only can this dataset lead to mitigation recommendations, it can refine the climate models that predict our global future.
“Mitigating agricultural soil greenhouse gas emissions can help us meet global climate goals,” said study co-author Chunhwa Jang, research scientist in the Department of Crop Sciences, part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at Illinois. “High spatial and temporal resolution, large-scale, and multi-year data are necessary to establish well-informed mitigation strategies. Before our study, these datasets just didn’t exist.”
Jang and colleagues under Kaiyu Guan’s leadership from the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center leveraged funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E SMARTFARM program to create the most extensive dataset yet available for on-farm nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide emissions. They laid out a large network of gas sampling sites in commercial corn and soybean fields under conventional, conservation, and no-tillage management.
Read the full article from the College of ACES.
University of Illinois Extension develops educational programs, extends knowledge, and builds partnerships to support people, communities, and their environments as part of the state's land-grant institution. Extension serves as the leading public outreach effort for University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences in all 102 Illinois counties through a network of 27 multi-county units and over 700 staff statewide. Extension’s mission is responsive to eight strategic priorities — community, economy, environment, food and agriculture, health, partnerships, technology and discovery, and workforce excellence — that are served through six program areas — 4-H youth development, agriculture and agribusiness, community and economic development, family and consumer science, integrated health disparities, and natural resources, environment, and energy.