Modeling N2O Emissions from Agricultural Fields in Southeast China

DNDC, a rainfall-driven and process-oriented model of soil carbon and nitrogen biogeochemistry, is applied to simulate the nitrous oxide emissions from agricultural ecosystem in Southeast China. We simulated the soil N₂O emission during a whole rice-wheat rotation cycle (from Nov. 1, 1996 to Oct. 31, 1997) under three different conditions, which are A) no fertilizer, B) both chemical fertilizer and manure and, C) chemical fertilizer only. The processes of N₂O emission were discussed in detail by comparing the model outputs with the results from field measurement. The comparison shows that the model is good at simulating most of the N₂O emission pulses and trends. Although the simulated N₂O emission fluxes are generally less than the measured ones, the model outputs during the dryland period, especially during the wheat reviving and maturing stages in spring, are much better than those during the paddy field period. Some sensitive experiments were made by simulating the N₂O emissions in spring, when there is a smallest gap between the simulated fluxes and the measured ones. Meanwhile, the effects of some important regulating factors, such as the rainfall, N deposition by rainfall, temperature, tillage, nitrogen fertilizer and manure application on N₂O emission during this period were analyzed. From the analysis, we draw a conclusion that soil moisture and fertilization are the most important regulating factors while the N₂O emission is sensitive to some other factors, such as temperature, manure, tillage and the wet deposition of atmospheric nitrate.