Abstract
The nitrogen (N) budget was developed for Jiulong River Watershed (JRW), an agricultural watershed in a warm and humid area of southeast China. Water quality monitoring, field surveys, modelling and GIS techniques were applied to estimate N flux of atmospheric deposition, mineralization, runoff, denitrification, and ammonia volatilization. Over the whole watershed, fertilizers, import of animal feeds, biotic fixation, mineralization and atmospheric deposition contributed 67.1%, 16.5%, 2.1%, 4.9% and 9.5%, respectively, of total N input (129.3 kg N ha−1 year−1). Runoff, sale of production, denitrification, and ammonia volatilization contributed 7.3%, 24.4%, 10.5% and 57.8% of total N output (72.9 kg N ha−1 year−1), respectively. The N budget for the JRW suggested that more than 50% of the N input was lost to the environment, and about 14% was discharged as riverine N, which indicated that agricultural and human activities in the watershed substantially impacted the estuary and coastal water quality, and so altered the N biogeochemistry process.
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Abbreviations
- JRW:
-
Jiulong River Watershed
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Professor John Hodgkiss for his help with English and two anonymous reviewers for providing helpful suggestions for improving the manuscript. This study was funded by the Department of Science and Technology of Fujian Province, P.R. China (2002H009).
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Chen, N., Hong, H., Zhang, L. et al. Nitrogen sources and exports in an agricultural watershed in Southeast China. Biogeochemistry 87, 169–179 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10533-007-9175-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10533-007-9175-2