The role of soils in provision of energy.

Soils have both direct and indirect impacts on available energy, but energy provision, in itself, has direct and indirect impacts on soils. Burning peats provides only approximately 0.02% of global energy supply yet emits approximately 0.

Potential yield challenges to scale-up of zero budget natural farming.

Under current trends, 60% of India's population (>10% of people on Earth) will experience severe food deficiencies by 2050. Increased production is urgently needed, but high costs and volatile prices are driving farmers into debt. Zero budget natural farming (ZBNF) is a grassroots movement that aims to improve farm viability by reducing costs.

Data for long-term marginal abatement cost curves of non-CO greenhouse gases.

This dataset represents long-term marginal abatement cost (MAC) curves of all major emission sources of non-CO greenhouse gases (GHGs); methane (CH), nitrous oxide (NO) and fluorinated gases (HFCs, PFCs and SF). The work is based on existing short-term MAC curve datasets and recent literature on individual mitigation measures. The data represent a comprehensive set of MAC curves, covering all major non-CO emission sources for 26 aggregated world regions.

"More crop per drop": Exploring India's cereal water use since 2005.

India has the highest national freshwater demand globally and 91% of India's freshwater is used in the agriculture sector. Cereals account for over 50% of the dietary water footprint in India and represent a potential opportunity for reducing water use in Indian agriculture. This study combines governmental production and irrigation statistics with crop distribution maps to examine trends in annual water use for cereal production in India between 2005 and 2014.

Disaggregated NO emission factors in China based on cropping parameters create a robust approach to the IPCC Tier 2 methodology.

China accounts for a third of global nitrogen fertilizer consumption. Under an International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Tier 2 assessment, emission factors (EFs) are developed for the major crop types using country-specific data. IPCC advises a separate calculation for the direct nitrous oxide (NO) emissions of rice cultivation from that of cropland and the consideration of the water regime used for irrigation.

Systems approaches in global change and biogeochemistry research.

Systems approaches have great potential for application in predictive ecology. In this paper, we present a range of examples, where systems approaches are being developed and applied at a range of scales in the field of global change and biogeochemical cycling. Systems approaches range from Bayesian calibration techniques at plot scale, through data assimilation methods at regional to continental scales, to multi-disciplinary numerical model applications at country to global scales.