Printed Potentiometric Ammonium Sensors for Agriculture Applications.

Ammonium (NH ) concentration is critical to both nutrient availability and nitrogen (N) loss in soil ecosystems but can be highly variable across spatial and temporal scales. For this reason, effectively informing agricultural practices such as fertilizer management and understanding of mechanisms of soil N loss require sensor technologies to monitor ammonium concentrations in real time. Our work investigates the performance of fully printed ammonium ion-selective sensors used in diverse soil environments.

Carbon-sink potential of continuous alfalfa agriculture lowered by short-term nitrous oxide emission events.

Alfalfa is the most widely grown forage crop worldwide and is thought to be a significant carbon sink due to high productivity, extensive root systems, and nitrogen-fixation. However, these conditions may increase nitrous oxide (NO) emissions thus lowering the climate change mitigation potential. We used a suite of long-term automated instrumentation and satellite imagery to quantify patterns and drivers of greenhouse gas fluxes in a continuous alfalfa agroecosystem in California.

Restoring wetlands on intensive agricultural lands modifies nitrogen cycling microbial communities and reduces NO production potential.

The concentration of nitrous oxide (NO), an ozone-depleting greenhouse gas, is rapidly increasing in the atmosphere. Most atmospheric NO originates in terrestrial ecosystems, of which the majority can be attributed to microbial cycling of nitrogen in agricultural soils. Here, we demonstrate how the abundance of nitrogen cycling genes vary across intensively managed agricultural fields and adjacent restored wetlands in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in California, USA.

Hot moments drive extreme nitrous oxide and methane emissions from agricultural peatlands.

Agricultural peatlands are estimated to emit approximately one third of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from croplands, but the temporal dynamics and controls of these emissions are poorly understood, particularly for nitrous oxide (N O). We used cavity ring-down spectroscopy and automated chambers in a drained agricultural peatland to measure over 70,000 individual N O, methane (CH ), and carbon dioxide (CO ) fluxes over 3 years. Our results showed that N O fluxes were high, contributing 26% (annual range: 16%-35%) of annual CO e emissions.

Productive wetlands restored for carbon sequestration quickly become net CO2 sinks with site-level factors driving uptake variability.

Inundated wetlands can potentially sequester substantial amounts of soil carbon (C) over the long-term because of slow decomposition and high primary productivity, particularly in climates with long growing seasons. Restoring such wetlands may provide one of several effective negative emission technologies to remove atmospheric CO2 and mitigate climate change. However, there remains considerable uncertainty whether these heterogeneous ecotones are consistent net C sinks and to what degree restoration and management methods affect C sequestration.

Mineralogical associations with soil carbon in managed wetland soils.

Carbon (C)-rich wetland soils are often drained for agriculture due to their capacity to support high net primary productivity. Increased drainage is expected this century to meet the agricultural demands of a growing population. Wetland drainage can result in large soil C losses and the concentration of residual soil minerals such as iron (Fe) and aluminum (Al).

Soil properties and sediment accretion modulate methane fluxes from restored wetlands.

Wetlands are the largest source of methane (CH ) globally, yet our understanding of how process-level controls scale to ecosystem fluxes remains limited. It is particularly uncertain how variable soil properties influence ecosystem CH emissions on annual time scales. We measured ecosystem carbon dioxide (CO ) and CH fluxes by eddy covariance from two wetlands recently restored on peat and alluvium soils within the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta of California.