Bergsma et al. N.E. Ostrom, and G.P. Robertson Click here to see Nitrogen undergoes many transformations in the soil. The key to nitrogen management for field crop production is manipulating these transformations to maximize crop uptake and minimize loss.
Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas implicated in both global warming and ozone destruction.
This study was designed to investigate the effect of ecosystem and recent soil moisture history on N 2 and N 2 O release by denitrification. The amounts of N 2 and N 2 O released from replicated, incubated samples during denitrification were measured using labeling and chromatographic and mass spectrometric techniques. There was a significant interaction of ecosystem and recent moisture history in response to prewetting. Apparently the Nos was fairly stable in the successional soils. In cropped soils, however, the Nos appeared to decline with drying and be reinduced by prewetting.