In the upper reaches of a Minnesota watershed, the water is so full of dissolved nitrous oxide that University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign hydrologist Zhongjie Yu likens it to a soda can.
In the upper reaches of a Minnesota watershed, the water is so full of dissolved nitrous oxide that University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign hydrologist Zhongjie Yu likens it to a soda can.
“If you grab water from the local streams and measure nitrous oxide, the saturation is tens of thousands of times higher than it would be at equilibrium with the atmosphere. In other words, it's super-saturated with this potent greenhouse gas. Naturally, you wonder where it’s coming from,” said Yu, an assistant professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, part of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at Illinois.
In two recent papers, Yu and his collaborators found that emissions from streams like the one they sampled in Minnesota are largely derived from nitrification processes in agricultural soils. Further, they found that stream emissions make up a much greater portion of the annual nitrous oxide budget than previously known.
“The conventional method to estimate nitrous oxide emissions is to measure from a chamber placed on the soil surface, but focusing entirely on soil doesn’t give you any idea of nitrous oxide emissions from downwind or downstream ecosystems that receive excess nitrogen lost from agricultural systems,” Yu said. “When we traced those downstream emissions, we found they could potentially account for one-third of the total nitrous oxide emissions within the Corn Belt region.”
Read more at University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences
Image: In two recent papers led by the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, researchers found that emissions from streams are largely derived from nitrification processes in agricultural soils. Further, they found that stream emissions make up a much greater portion of the annual nitrous oxide budget than previously known. (Credit: Zhongjie Yu, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)
