Mitigating nitrous oxide emissions from agricultural soils by precision management

Abstract

Nitrous oxide (N₂O) emissions make up a significant part of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. There is an urgent need to identify new approaches to the mitigation of these emissions with emerging technology. In this short review four approaches to precision managements of agricultural systems are described based on examples of work being undertaken in the UK and New Zealand. They offer the opportunity for N₂O mitigation without any reduction in productivity. These approaches depend upon new sensor technology, modeling and spatial information with which to make management decisions and interventions that can both improve agricultural productivity and environmental protection.

Keywords

decision support systems / mitigation / nitrous oxide / precision farming

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the funders of this work, including the Scottish Government Strategic Research Programme, N-Circle project (BB/N013484/1) and Teagasc in Ireland. The New Zealand study was funded by the New Zealand Government through the Global Research Alliance.

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Robert M. Rees, Juliette Maire, Anna Florence, Nicholas Cowan, Ute Skiba, Tony van der Weerden, and Xiaotang Ju declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2019. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)