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Impacts of grazing intensity on denitrification and N2O production in a semi-arid grassland ecosystem

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Abstract

N2O production from denitrification in soils contributes to the enhanced greenhouse effect and the destruction of the stratospheric ozone. Ungulate grazing affects denitrification and the production of N2O. The short-term effect of grazing on denitrification and N2O production has been examined in several grassland ecosystems. However, the effects of long-term grazing have rarely been studied. We measured denitrification and N2O production during the 2005 and 2006 growing seasons in a long-term (17 years) experiment that had five grazing intensities (GI; 0.00, 1.33, 2.67, 4.00 and 5.33 sheep ha−1). We found that denitrification and N2O production rates were seasonally variable during the measurement period, with higher values observed in summer and lower values found in spring and autumn. The grazed treatments resulted in decreased denitrification and N2O production, primarily due to the reduced soil nitrate concentration and organic N content under the long-term grazing. This supported our hypothesis that long-term over-grazing suppresses denitrification and N2O production. Although significant differences in denitrification and N2O production were not found between the four GI, there was a general trend that cumulative denitrification and N2O production decreased as grazing intensity increased, especially in 2006. Lower N losses via denitrification and N2O production in the grazed plots, to some extent, may contribute to the mitigation of greenhouse gas emission and help to preserve soil N and ameliorate the negative impacts of grazing on plant growth, productivity, and ecological restoration processes in the temperate steppe in northern China.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the staff of the permanent meteorological station of Inner Mongolian Grassland Ecosystem Research Station, the Chinese Academy of Sciences for providing the meteorological data, Dr. Shiping Wang for the maintenance of the field experiment plot. We would like to express our gratitude for the valuable and constructive comments from the anonymous reviewers, and we are also highly appreciative of the editor’s care and much patience in handling our manuscript. This study was supported by the National Natural Science foundation of China (30670347, 30521002) and the State Key Basic Research Development Program of China (No. 2007CB106800).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Vegetation and Environmental Change, Institute of Botany, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiangshan, Beijing, 100093, China

    Yuqing Xu, Shiqiang Wan, Weixin Cheng & Linghao Li

  2. Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yuquanlu, Beijing, 100049, China

    Yuqing Xu

  3. Department of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, USA

    Weixin Cheng

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  1. Yuqing Xu
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  2. Shiqiang Wan
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  4. Linghao Li
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Correspondence to Linghao Li.

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Xu, Y., Wan, S., Cheng, W. et al. Impacts of grazing intensity on denitrification and N2O production in a semi-arid grassland ecosystem. Biogeochemistry 88, 103–115 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10533-008-9197-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10533-008-9197-4

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