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Ventrella, D., Stellacci, A. M., Castrignanò, A., Charfeddine, M., & Castellini, M. (2016). Effects of crop residue management on winter durum wheat productivity in a long term experiment in Southern Italy. European Journal of Agronomy, 77, 188–198.
Abstract: A long-term experiment comparing different crop residue (CR) managements was established in 1977 in Foggia (Apulia region, southern Italy). The objective of this study was to investigate the long-term effects of different types of crop residue management on main yield response parameters in a continuous cropping system of winter durum wheat. In order to correctly interpret the results, models accounting for spatial error autocorrelation were used and compared with ordinary least square models. Eight crop residue management treatments, based on burning of wheat straw and stubble or their incorporation with or without N fertilization and irrigation, were compared. The experimental design was a complete randomized block with five replicates. Results indicated that the dynamics of yield, grain protein content and hectolitric weight of winter durum wheat did not show any decline as usually expected when a monoculture is carried out for a long time. In addition, the temporal variability of productivity was more affected by meteorological factors, such as air temperature and rainfall, than CR management treatments. Higher wheat grain yields and hectolitric weights quite frequently occurred after burning of wheat straw compared with straw incorporation without nitrogen fertilization and autumn irrigation and this was attributed to temporary mineral N immobilization in the soil. The rate of 50 kg ha(-1) of N seemed to counterbalance this negative effect when good condition of soil moisture occurred in the autumn period, so yielding the same productive level of straw burning treatment. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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Lai, R., Arca, P., Lagomarsino, A., Cappai, C., Seddaiu, G., Demurtas, C. E., et al. (2017). Manure fertilization increases soil respiration and creates a negative carbon budget in a Mediterranean maize (Zea mays L.)-based cropping system. Catena, 151, 202–212.
Abstract: Agronomic research is important to identify suitable options for improving soil carbon (C) sequestration and reducing soil CO2 emissions. Therefore, the objectives of this study were i) to analyse the on-farm effects of different nitrogen fertilization sources on soil respiration, ii) to explore the effect of fertilization on soil respiration sensitivity to soil temperature (T) and iii) to assess the effect of the different fertilization regimes on the soil C balance. We hypothesized that i) the soil CO2 emission dynamics in Mediterranean irrigated cropping systems were mainly affected by fertilization management and T and ii) fertilization affected the soil C budget via different C inputs and CO2 efflux. Four fertilization systems (farmyard manure, cattle slurry, cattle slurry + mineral, and mineral) were compared in a double-crop rotation based on silage maize (Zea mays L) and a mixture of Italian ryegrass (Lolium multiflorum Lam.) and oats (Avena sativa L). The research was performed in the dairy district of Arborea, in the coastal zone of Sardinia (Italy), from May 2011 to May 2012. The soil was a Psammentic Palexeralfs with a sandy texture (940 g sand kg(-1)). The soil total respiration (SR), heterotrophic respiration (Rh), T and soil water content (SWC) were simultaneously measured in situ. The soil C balance was computed considering the Rh C losses and the soil C inputs from fertilizer and crop residues. The results showed that the maximum soil CO2 emission rates soon after the application of organic fertilizer reached values up to 121,1111 1 111(-2) s(-1). On average, the manure fertilizer showed significantly higher CO2 emissions, which resulted in a negative annual C balance (-2.9 t ha(-1)). T also affected the soil respiration temporal dynamics during the summer, consistently with results obtained in other temperate climatic regions that are characterized by wet summers and contrary to results from rainfed Mediterranean systems where the summer SR and Rh are constrained by the low SWC. The sensitivity of soil respiration to temperature significantly increased with C input from fertilizer. In conclusion, this research supported the hypotheses tested. Furthermore, the results indicated that i) soil CO2 efflux was significantly affected by fertilization management and T, and ii) fertilization with manure increased the soil respiration and resulted in a significantly negative soil C budget. This latter finding could be primarily explained by a reduction in productivity and, consequently, in crop residue with organic fertilization alone as compared to mineral, by the favourable SWC and T for mineralization, and by the sandy soil texture, which hindered the formation of macroaggregates and hence soil C stabilization, making fertilizer organic inputs highly susceptible to mineralization. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
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Gomara, I., Bellocchi, G., Martin, R., Rodriguez-Fonseca, B., & Ruiz-Ramos, M. (2020). Influence of climate variability on the potential forage production of a mown permanent grassland in the French Massif Central. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 280, 107768.
Abstract: Climate Services (CS) provide support to decision makers across socio-economic sectors. In the agricultural sector, one of the most important CS applications is to provide timely and accurate yield forecasts based on climate prediction. In this study, the Pasture Simulation model (PaSim) was used to simulate, for the period 1959–2015, the forage production of a mown grassland system (Laqueuille, Massif Central of France) under different management conditions, with meteorological inputs extracted from the SAFRAN atmospheric database. The aim was to generate purely climate-dependent timeseries of optimal forage production, a variable that was maximized by brighter and warmer weather conditions at the grassland. A long-term increase was observed in simulated forage yield, with the 1995–2015 average being 29% higher than the 1959–1979 average. Such increase seems consistent with observed rising trends in temperature and CO2, and multi-decadal changes in incident solar radiation. At interannual timescales, sea surface temperature anomalies of the Mediterranean (MED), Tropical North Atlantic (TNA), equatorial Pacific (El Niño Southern Oscillation) and the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index were found robustly correlated with annual forage yield values. Relying only on climatic predictors, we developed a stepwise statistical multi-regression model with leave-one-out cross-validation. Under specific management conditions (e.g., three annual cuts) and from one to five months in advance, the generated model successfully provided a p-value<0.01 in correlation (t-test), a root mean square error percentage (%RMSE) of 14.6% and a 71.43% hit rate predicting above/below average years in terms of forage yield collection. This is the first modeling study on the possible role of large-scale oceanic–atmospheric teleconnections in driving forage production in Europe. As such, it provides a useful springboard to implement a grassland seasonal forecasting system in this continent.
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Minet, J., Laloy, E., Tychon, B., & François, L. (2015). Bayesian inversions of a dynamic vegetation model at four European grassland sites. Biogeosciences, 12(9), 2809–2829.
Abstract: Eddy covariance data from four European grassland sites are used to probabilistically invert the CARAIB (CARbon Assimilation In the Biosphere) dynamic vegetation model (DVM) with 10 unknown parameters, using the DREAM((ZS)) (DiffeRential Evolution Adaptive Metropolis) Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) sampler. We focus on comparing model inversions, considering both homoscedastic and heteroscedastic eddy covariance residual errors, with variances either fixed a priori or jointly inferred together with the model parameters. Agreements between measured and simulated data during calibration are comparable with previous studies, with root mean square errors (RMSEs) of simulated daily gross primary productivity (GPP), ecosystem respiration (RECO) and evapotranspiration (ET) ranging from 1.73 to 2.19, 1.04 to 1.56 g C m(-2) day(-1) and 0.50 to 1.28 mm day(-1), respectively. For the calibration period, using a homoscedastic eddy covariance residual error model resulted in a better agreement between measured and modelled data than using a heteroscedastic residual error model. However, a model validation experiment showed that CARAIB models calibrated considering heteroscedastic residual errors perform better. Posterior parameter distributions derived from using a heteroscedastic model of the residuals thus appear to be more robust. This is the case even though the classical linear heteroscedastic error model assumed herein did not fully remove heteroscedasticity of the GPP residuals. Despite the fact that the calibrated model is generally capable of fitting the data within measurement errors, systematic bias in the model simulations are observed. These are likely due to model inadequacies such as shortcomings in the photosynthesis modelling. Besides the residual error treatment, differences between model parameter posterior distributions among the four grassland sites are also investigated. It is shown that the marginal distributions of the specific leaf area and characteristic mortality time parameters can be explained by site-specific ecophysiological characteristics.
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Yang, H., Dobbie, S., Ramirez-Villegas, J., Feng, K., Challinor, A. J., Chen, B., et al. (2016). Potential negative consequences of geoengineering on crop production: A study of Indian groundnut. Geophys. Res. Let., 43(22), 11786–11795.
Abstract: Geoengineering has been proposed to stabilize global temperature, but its impacts on crop production and stability are not fully understood. A few case studies suggest that certain crops are likely to benefit from solar dimming geoengineering, yet we show that geoengineering is projected to have detrimental effects for groundnut. Using an ensemble of crop-climate model simulations, we illustrate that groundnut yields in India undergo a statistically significant decrease of up to 20% as a result of solar dimming geoengineering relative to RCP4.5. It is somewhat reassuring, however, to find that after a sustained period of 50 years of geoengineering crop yields return to the nongeoengineered values within a few years once the intervention is ceased.
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