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Can conservation tillage and reduced irrigation promote sustainability in agroecosystems through lowering nitrous oxide emissions? A synthesis

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Abstract

Background and Aims

The agriculture sector is a major producer of greenhouse gases. To successfully transition to a green economy, we should further optimise agriculture practices so that we offset emissions while preserving crop productivity. We questioned here how two common organic management practices, reducing irrigation and conservation tillage as well as their interaction modify N2O emissions.

Methods

We synthesized across 265 studies and combined a series of linear models and a meta-analytical method of moments to analyze our data.

Results

We observed that reducing irrigation induced increases of about 66.1% in N2O emissions in rice but declines of over 17% for other crops, subject to mean annual temperature conditions. No tillage lowered N2O emissions, which was not the case for the reduced tillage practice. This resulted into the overall effect of conservation tillage practices on N2O emissions being non-significant.

Conclusion

We present evidence that managing N2O emissions from agroecosystems depends strongly on climatic conditions and crop type used. Mapping those dependencies facilitates budgeting greenhouse gas emissions from agroecosystems and smooths the path towards meeting sustainability targets in agriculture and horticulture.

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Data availability

We attach the data to the article in the form of appendices.

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Funding

The article was funded through the NSFC Research Fund for Outstanding Foreign Young Scholars (grand agreement number 32250610), “Arbuscular mycorrhizae: a land of promise for mitigating terrestrial N2O emissions”, awarded to SDV.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Biocontrol, School of Ecology, Sun Yat-Sen University, Shenzhen, 518107, China

    Junjiang Chen, Guolin C. Li, Tien Ming Lee & Stavros D. Veresoglou

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  1. Junjiang Chen
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  2. Guolin C. Li
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  4. Stavros D. Veresoglou
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Contributions

Conceived the analysis: SDV; Collected the data; JC; Carried out the analysis: JC, SDV; Wrote the manuscript: JC, SDV with contributions from GCL, TML. All authors contributed comments to the manuscript and approved the final version.

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Correspondence to Stavros D. Veresoglou.

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Chen, J., Li, G.C., Lee, T.M. et al. Can conservation tillage and reduced irrigation promote sustainability in agroecosystems through lowering nitrous oxide emissions? A synthesis. Plant Soil (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-023-06469-7

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