Abstract
Increasing crop nitrogen use efficiency appears to be an opportunity to increase crop productivity. However, a close examination of the components of nitrogen use efficiency indicates that plant modification for improving nitrogen use efficiency are quite limited. The uptake of nitrogen is highly regulated so that it aligns with the capacity of the plant to metabolize and store the accumulated nitrogen. Also, modern, commercial crop plants already partition 80% or more of the total nitrogen accumulated by the plant to the seeds. The major opportunity for increasing nitrogen use efficiency is in the soil where losses can be quite high due to soil runoff, leaching through the soil, and denitrification due to soil microbial activity. Often less than 40% of applied nitrogen fertilizer is currently recovered by crops so that major improvements in nitrogen use efficiency seem possible with improvements in fertilizer technology and management.
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Sinclair, T., Rufty, T.W. (2022). Plant Nitrogen Use Efficiency. In: Bringing Skepticism to Crop Science. SpringerBriefs in Agriculture. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14414-1_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14414-1_5
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