A method to derive nitrogen transport factors for New Zealand's agricultural lands.

Risk index tools have the potential to assist farmers in making strategic decisions regarding their farm design to manage losses of nutrients. Such tools require a vulnerability framework, and these are often based on scores or rankings. These frameworks struggle to take account of interactions between elements of the physical environment.

Land-use Suitability is Not an Intrinsic Property of a Land Parcel.

Agricultural production has economic, environmental, social and cultural consequences beyond farm boundaries, but information about these impacts is not readily available to decision makers. This study applied the land use suitability concept by carrying out an assessment of a region that has the potential for intensification of agricultural production, but where eutrophication of river and estuary receiving environments due to nitrogen enrichment is a significant issue. The assessment evaluated three indicators for each farmable land parcel in the region: productive potential (the inherent productive and economic potential of the parcel), relative contribution (the potential for the parcel to contribute nitrogen to receiving environments compared to other land parcels), and pressure (the load of nitrogen delivered to receiving environments compared to the loads that ensure environmental objectives are achieved).

S-map parameters for APSIM.

Agroecosystem models have become an important tool for impact assessment studies, and their results are often used for management and policy decisions. Soil information is a key input for these models, yet site-specific soil property data are often not available, and soil databases are increasingly being used to provide input parameters. For New Zealand, the digital spatial soil information system S-map provides geospatial data on a range of soil characteristics, including estimates of soil water properties.

Environmental Parameters Affecting the Concentration of Iodine in New Zealand Pasture.

Iodine (I) is an essential trace element commonly deficient in agricultural systems. Whereas there is much information on I in food crops, there is a lacuna of knowledge on the environmental factors that affect pasture I concentrations. We aimed to identify the most important environmental factors affecting the concentration of I in New Zealand pastures, and the consequences to agricultural systems.