A study of the N2O emission from grassland with the FASSET farm model

Summary

Local adaptations of the IPCC methodology (http://www.ipcc.ch) are applied in different countries. They include a combination of theoretical, experimental and simulation methods for evaluating the activity and factors indicated N2O emission. The N2O emission from agricultural soil is considered an important source both for environmental impact and non-industrial losses of nitrogen (Petersen, Olesen, 2002). In this study a multifactorial approach, based on dynamic modelling, is used at a farm/field level to estimate N2O emission from grassland. For this purpose an algorithm for modeling of gaseous N2O emission was developed and analyzed. In the algorithm, based on the conceptual process-oriented model HIP (Davidson et al., 2000), both nitrification and denitrification are included as important sources for the N2O emission (Bremner, 1997). Soil-microbiological processes are described with first-order kinetics. The algorithm was implemented within the Danish farm model FASSET (Berntsen et al., 2003) to study of N2O emission from grassland under different treatments.