EFFECTS OF SUBSTITUTION OF MINERAL NITROGEN WITH ORGANIC AMENDMENTS ON NITROGEN LOSS FROM SLOPING CROPLAND OF PURPLE SOIL

Highlights

● Interflow acts as the dominant pathway for N loss loadings.

● The purple soil region is a hot spot of nitrate leaching in China.

● Mineral N substitution with organic amendments can be recommended as optimal practices for cropland N management.

Abstract

Nitrogen loss from purple soil can lead to large negative impacts to the environment considering the wide distribution of this soil type in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River. Therefore, nitrogen loss patterns from sloping cropland of purple soil in the Sichuan Basin with the following fertilization regimes were studied in a wheat-maize rotation system: 100% organic fertilizer (OM), using pig manure to replace 30% of mineral N (OMNPK) and crop residue to replace 15% of the mineral N (CRNPK) plus standard mineral fertilization (NPK) and no fertilizer control. The cumulative hydrological N loss could be as high as 45 kg·ha⁻¹ N. The interflow accounted for up to 90% of the total N loss followed by sediment and overland flow losses. The high N loss via interflow found in this study highlighting that sloping cropland of purple soil may be one of the hot spots of N leaching. Compared to the NPK regime, organic substitution regimes (i.e., OM, OMNPK and CRNPK) decreased total hydrological N loss loadings by 30% to 68%. In addition, they can maintain annual crop yields and decrease yield-scaled total hydrological N losses by 18% to 71%. In conclusion, long-term substitution of mineral N with organic amendments can maintain high crop productivity and reduce environmental N loss loadings, and thereby recommended as good N management practices to minimize the risk of agricultural non-point source pollution in the purple soil region of China.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

improved fertilization regime / interflow / nitrogen forms / nitrogen leaching / purple soil / sloping cropland

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (U20A20107 and 42007100), the Special Assistant Researcher Foundation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Zhiyuan Yao), the IMHE Youth S&T Foundation (SDS-QN-2101). We sincerely thank the staff of the Yanting Agro-Ecological Station of Purplish Soil for their great contributions to the field measurements.

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Bo Zhu, Zhiyuan Yao, Dongni Hu, and Hamidou Bah 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) 2022. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)