Abstract: Soil organic carbon is a key variable with regard to soil fertility influencing yield and yield security of agricultural crop production by regulating water budget and nutrient cycling. Those services might become even more relevant with respect to climate change. The sensitivity of crop yields on soil organic carbon content is influenced by site-specific conditions. To assess future vulnerability of yield security with respect to soil organic carbon contents in European croplands soil-crop models must consider the interaction of SOC and crop growth. Long term experiments that include treatments which lead to variable soil organic carbon contents can provide information on those relationships. Because the effect of soil fertility functions supported by SOC depends on a range of natural and anthropogenic factors we used various long term experiments in Sweden and Germany to evaluate the model CENTURY4.6. Thereafter we examined the impact of SOC on crop yields on site level by scenario runs modifying initial SOC levels and weather conditions. Preliminary results show differences in the modeled and observed soil organic carbon values for a range of observed long term experiments. The difference between modelled and measured of SOC stocks is up to 30% after 56 years. Overall, The use of the default values and setting were not appropriate to derive acceptable results, so the adjustment of some model parameter are required.

Abstract: The DNDC, LandscapeDNDC and IAP-N-GAS models have been designed to simulate the carbon and nitrogen processes of terrestrial ecosystems. Until now, a comparison of these models using simultaneous observations has not been reported, although such a comparison is essential for further model development and application. This study aimed to evaluate the performance of the models, delineate the strengths and limitations of each model for simulating soil nitrous oxide (N2O) and nitric oxide (NO) emissions, and explore short-comings of these models that may require reconsideration. We conducted comparisons among the models using simultaneous observations of both gases and relevant variables from the winter wheat-summer maize rotation system at three field sites with calcareous soils. Simulations of N2O and NO emissions by the three models agreed well with annual observations, but not with daily observations. All models failed to correctly simulate soil moisture, which could explain some of the incorrect daily fluxes of N2O and NO, especially for intensive fluxes during the growing season. Multi-model ensembles are promising approaches to better simulate daily gas emissions. IAP-N-GAS underestimated the priming effect of straw incorporation on N2O and NO emissions, but better results were obtained with DNDC95 and LandscapeDNDC. LandscapeDNDC and IAP-N-GAS need to improve the simulation of irrigation water allocation and residue decomposition processes, respectively, and together to distinguish different irrigation methods as DNDC95 does. All three models overestimated the emissions of the nitrogenous gases for high nitrogen fertilizer (>430 kg N ha(-1) yr(-1)) addition treatments, and therefore, future research should focus more on the simulation of the limitation of soil dissolvable organic carbon on denitrification in calcareous soils.