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    Management-induced changes in soil organic carbon on global croplands
    (Katlenburg-Lindau [u.a.] : Copernicus, 2022) Karstens, Kristine; Bodirsky, Benjamin Leon; Dietrich, Jan Philipp; Dondini, Marta; Heinke, Jens; Kuhnert, Matthias; Müller, Christoph; Rolinski, Susanne; Smith, Pete; Weindl, Isabelle; Lotze-Campen, Hermann; Popp, Alexander
    Soil organic carbon (SOC), one of the largest terrestrial carbon (C) stocks on Earth, has been depleted by anthropogenic land cover change and agricultural management. However, the latter has so far not been well represented in global C stock assessments. While SOC models often simulate detailed biochemical processes that lead to the accumulation and decay of SOC, the management decisions driving these biophysical processes are still little investigated at the global scale. Here we develop a spatially explicit data set for agricultural management on cropland, considering crop production levels, residue returning rates, manure application, and the adoption of irrigation and tillage practices. We combine it with a reduced-complexity model based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) tier 2 method to create a half-degree resolution data set of SOC stocks and SOC stock changes for the first 30 cm of mineral soils. We estimate that, due to arable farming, soils have lost around 34.6 GtC relative to a counterfactual hypothetical natural state in 1975. Within the period 1975-2010, this SOC debt continued to expand by 5 GtC (0.14 GtCyr-1) to around 39.6 GtC. However, accounting for historical management led to 2.1 GtC fewer (0.06 GtCyr-1) emissions than under the assumption of constant management. We also find that management decisions have influenced the historical SOC trajectory most strongly by residue returning, indicating that SOC enhancement by biomass retention may be a promising negative emissions technique. The reduced-complexity SOC model may allow us to simulate management-induced SOC enhancement - also within computationally demanding integrated (land use) assessment modeling.
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    Multimodel Evaluation of Nitrous Oxide Emissions From an Intensively Managed Grassland
    (Hoboken, NJ : Wiley, 2020) Fuchs, Kathrin; Merbold, Lutz; Buchmann, Nina; Bretscher, Daniel; Brilli, Lorenzo; Fitton, Nuala; Topp, Cairistiona F.E.; Klumpp, Katja; Lieffering, Mark; Martin, Raphaël; Newton, Paul C.D.; Rees, Robert M.; Rolinski, Susanne; Smith, Pete; Snow, Val
    Process-based models are useful for assessing the impact of changing management practices and climate on yields and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agricultural systems such as grasslands. They can be used to construct national GHG inventories using a Tier 3 approach. However, accurate simulations of nitrous oxide (N2O) fluxes remain challenging. Models are limited by our understanding of soil-plant-microbe interactions and the impact of uncertainty in measured input parameters on simulated outputs. To improve model performance, thorough evaluations against in situ measurements are needed. Experimental data of N2O emissions under two management practices (control with typical fertilization versus increased clover and no fertilization) were acquired in a Swiss field experiment. We conducted a multimodel evaluation with three commonly used biogeochemical models (DayCent in two variants, PaSim, APSIM in two variants) comparing four years of data. DayCent was the most accurate model for simulating N2O fluxes on annual timescales, while APSIM was most accurate for daily N2O fluxes. The multimodel ensemble average reduced the error in estimated annual fluxes by 41% compared to an estimate using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)-derived method for the Swiss agricultural GHG inventory (IPCC-Swiss), but individual models were not systematically more accurate than IPCC-Swiss. The model ensemble overestimated the N2O mitigation effect of the clover-based treatment (measured: 39–45%; ensemble: 52–57%) but was more accurate than IPCC-Swiss (IPCC-Swiss: 72–81%). These results suggest that multimodel ensembles are valuable for estimating the impact of climate and management on N2O emissions. ©2019. The Authors.
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    Generating a rule-based global gridded tillage dataset
    (Katlenburg-Lindau : Copernics Publications, 2020) Porwollik, Vera; Rolinski, Susanne; Heinke, Jens; Müller, Christoph
    Tillage is a central element in agricultural soil management and has direct and indirect effects on processes in the biosphere. Effects of agricultural soil management can be assessed by soil, crop, and ecosystem models, but global assessments are hampered by lack of information on the type of tillage and their spatial distribution. This study describes the generation of a classification of tillage practices and presents the spatially explicit mapping of these crop-specific tillage systems for around the year 2005. Tillage practices differ by the kind of equipment used, soil surface and depth affected, timing, and their purpose within the cropping systems. We classified the broad variety of globally relevant tillage practices into six categories: no-tillage in the context of Conservation Agriculture, traditional annual, traditional rotational, rotational, reduced, and conventional annual tillage. The identified tillage systems were allocated to gridded crop-specific cropland areas with a resolution of 5 arcmin. Allocation rules were based on literature findings and combine area information on crop type, water management regime, field size, water erosion, income, and aridity. We scaled reported national Conservation Agriculture areas down to grid cells via a probability-based approach for 54 countries. We provide area estimates of the six tillage systems aggregated to global and country scale. We found that 8.67Mkm2 of global cropland area was tilled intensively at least once a year, whereas the remaining 2.65Mkm2 was tilled less intensely. Further, we identified 4.67Mkm2 of cropland as an area where Conservation Agriculture could be expanded to under current conditions. The tillage classification enables the parameterization of different soil management practices in various kinds of model simulations. The crop-specific tillage dataset indicates the spatial distribution of soil management practices, which is a prerequisite to assess erosion, carbon sequestration potential, as well as water, and nutrient dynamics of cropland soils. The dynamic definition of the allocation rules and accounting for national statistics, such as the share of Conservation Agriculture per country, also allow for derivation of datasets for historical and future global soil management scenarios. The resulting tillage system dataset and source code are accessible via an open-data repository (DOIs: https://doi.org/10.5880/PIK.2019.009 and https://doi.org/10.5880/PIK.2019.010, Porwollik et al., 2019a, b). © Author(s) 2019.