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Greenhouse Gas Emissions Dynamics as Influenced by Corn Residue Removal in Continuous Corn System
Author(s) -
Guzman Jose,
Al-Kaisi Mahdi,
Parkin Timothy
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
soil science society of america journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.836
H-Index - 168
eISSN - 1435-0661
pISSN - 0361-5995
DOI - 10.2136/sssaj2014.07.0298
Subject(s) - tillage , greenhouse gas , residue (chemistry) , environmental science , human fertilization , conventional tillage , crop residue , growing season , agronomy , zoology , chemistry , agriculture , biology , ecology , biochemistry
The removal of corn residue for bioethanol may require changes in current tillage and fertilization practices to minimize potential alterations to the soil environment that may lead to increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emission. The objectives of this study were to examine how tillage, N fertilization rates, residue removal, and their interactions affect CO 2 , and N 2 O soil surface emissions. Greater CO 2 emission coincided with higher soil temperatures typically observed with conventional tillage (CT) compared with no‐tillage (NT), resulting in greater annual cumulative CO 2 emission in CT (18.1 CO 2 Mg ha −1 yr −1 ) compared with NT (16.2 CO 2 Mg ha −1 yr −1 ) in 2009 and 2010 across sites. However, drier soil conditions during the growing season in 2011 lead to higher soil temperatures compared with 2009 and 2010. Consequently, annual cumulative CO 2 emission from NT with 50 and 100% residue removal was (19.5 CO 2 Mg ha −1 yr −1 ) greater than that from CT (17.8 CO 2 Mg ha −1 yr −1 ) across all residue removal rates and from NT (17.5 CO 2 Mg ha −1 yr −1 ) with no residue removal, respectively across all N rates in the Ames central site (AC) in 2011. In the Armstrong southwest site (ASW) site, there were no significant differences between tillage or residue removal rates for annual cumulative CO 2 emission (19.9 CO 2 Mg ha −1 yr −1 ) in 2011. Although N 2 O emission was considerably lower than CO 2 emission, differences in N fertilization rates did have a significant impact on global warming potential once these gases were converted on the basis of their radiative forcing of the atmosphere.