Improving soil fertility/productivity and reducing environmental impact of nitrogen (N) fertilization are essential for sustainable agriculture. Quantifying the contribution of various fertilization regimes to soil N storage and loss has been lacking in a wide range of spatiotemporal scales. Based on data collected from field experiments at three typical agricultural zones in China, soil N dyna...

Agronomic practices, climatic variables, and soil conditions are key factors in crop productivity. Although the effects of soil chemical properties and water and agronomic crop management are known, there is little information about effective soil depth and its influence on crop productivity. Since most crop fertilization systems are based on the productive potential associated with climatic co...

Published in Agron. J. 105:143–149 (2013) doi:10.2134/agronj2012.0067 Copyright © 2013 by the American Society of Agronomy, 5585 Guilford Road, Madison, WI 53711. All rights reserved. No part of this periodical may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permis...

Understanding the role of soil organic matter (SOM) in soil quality and subsequent crop yield and input requirements is useful for agricultural sustainability. SOM is widely considered to affect a wide range of soil properties, however, great uncertainty still remains in identifying the relationships between SOM and crop yield due to the difficulty in separating the effect of SOM from other yie...

The current precision fertilization technology of maize is still incomplete and unsystematic. In the paper, according to the fact of maize production of black soil zone in Jilin province, spatial variability of soil nutrient is studied, precision fertilization model of maize is introduced, a web-based expert system for maize precision fertilization is developed. Finally, the precision fertiliza...

Boreal ecosystems store one-third of global soil organic carbon (SOC) and are particularly sensitive to climate warming and higher nutrient inputs. Thus, a better description of how forest managements such as nutrient fertilization impact soil carbon (C) and its temperature sensitivity is needed to better predict feedbacks between C cycling and climate. The temperature sensitivity of in situ so...

The effect of nitrogen fertilization on root length (RL) distribution of winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) was investigated. The study was conducted in Prague-Ruzyne on clay loam Chernozemic soil in the years 1996–2003. Two (N0, N1) and three (N0, N1, N2) treatments, unfertilized (N0), fertilized with 100 kg (N1) and 200 kg N/ha (N2) were studied in 1996–2000 and 2001–2003, respectively. Nitr...

Soil organic matter models are widely used to study soil organic carbon (SOC) dynamics. Here, we used the CENTURY model to simulate SOC in wheat-corn cropping systems at three long-term fertilization trials. Our study indicates that CENTURY can simulate fertilization effects on SOC dynamics under different climate and soil conditions. The normalized root mean square error is less than 15% for a...

BACKGROUND Loss of biodiversity and increased nutrient inputs are two of the most crucial anthropogenic factors driving ecosystem change. Although both received considerable attention in previous studies, information on their interactive effects on ecosystem functioning is scarce. In particular, little is known on how soil biota and their functions are affected by combined changes in plant dive...

The Iowa soil-test interpretations and fertilizer recommendations for phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) were last updated in 1996 and 1999. The 1996 update involved the most important changes compared with previous recommendations. New soil-test P and K interpretation classes (very low, low, optimum, high, and very high) were developed to classify soil-test values into two sets corresponding to ...