A spatially explicit methodology to quantify soil nutrient balances and their uncertainties at the national level
By J. Lesschen, J. Stoorvogel, E. Smaling, Gerard B. M. Heuvelink, A. Veldkamp. Nutrient Cycling in Agroecosystems, 2007
123 citations recorded by the source corpus.
A soil nutrient balance is a commonly used indicator to assess changes in soil fertility. In this paper, an earlier developed methodology by Stoorvogel and Smaling to assess the soil nutrient balance is given a major overhaul, based on growing insights and advances in data availability and modelling. The soil nutrient balance is treated as the net balance of five inflows (mineral fertilizer, organic inputs, atmospheric deposition, nitrogen fixation and sedimentation) and five outflows (crop products, crop residues, leaching, gaseous losses and erosion). This study aims to improve the existing methodology by making it spatially explicit, improving various transfer functions, and by modelling explicitly the uncertainties in the estimations. Spatially explicit modelling has become possible through a novel methodology to create a simulated land use map on the basis of the principles of traditional qualitative land evaluation. New literature data on the various inputs and outputs allowed improvement of the estimations of deposition, sedimentation, leaching, and erosion. Moreover, the uncertainty of the calculated soil nutrient balances was assessed. To illustrate the improved methodology, we applied it to Burkina Faso and revealed that nutrient depletion is occurring throughout the country at rates of $${-20\pm 15\,{\rm kg}\,{\rm N}\,{\rm ha}^{-1}}$$, $${-3.7\pm2.9}\,{\rm kg}\,{\rm P}\,{\rm ha}^{-1}$$ and $${-15\pm12}\,{\rm kg}\,{\rm K}\,{\rm ha}^{-1}$$. The resulting spatial soil nutrient balances at the national level can constitute the basis for targeting soil fertility policies at lower levels.
Subfields: Environmental Chemistry, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/52a6a03eeb1a195c492865db048d7f02dfbb2043
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In Soil Science
Citations in the corpus
- Agronomic phosphorus imbalances across the world's croplands (2011, background): “However, regional agronomic P imbalances are difficult to address because they represent the aggregate effects of many complex factors, including nutrient management decisions by individual farmers, socioeconomic conditions, government policies, and environmental setting (4, 12, 33).”
- A high-resolution assessment on global nitrogen flows in cropland (2010, background): “(19) made an attempt to quantify nitrogen flows with a spatially explicit approach at the national level for Burkina Faso.”