Increased nitrogen enrichment and shifted patterns in the world’s grassland: 1860–2014
2018
Abstract. Production and application to soils of manure excreta from
livestock farming significantly perturb the global nutrient balance and
result in significant greenhouse gas emissions that warm the earth's climate.
Despite much attention paid to synthetic nitrogen (N) fertilizer and manure N
applications to croplands, spatially explicit, continuous time-series
datasets of manure and fertilizer N inputs on pastures and rangelands are
lacking. We developed three global gridded datasets at a resolution of
0.5 ∘ × 0.5 ∘ for the period 1860–2016 (i.e., annual
manure N deposition (by grazing animals) rate, synthetic N fertilizer and N
manure application rates), by combining annual and 5 arcmin spatial data on
pastures and rangelands with country-level statistics on livestock manure,
mineral and chemical fertilizers, and land use information for cropland and
permanent meadows and pastures. Based on the new data products, we estimated
that total N inputs, the sum of manure N deposition, manure N application and fertilizer N
application to pastures and rangelands, increased globally from 15 to
101 Tg N yr −1 during 1860–2016. In particular during the period
2000–2016, livestock manure N deposition accounted for 83 % of the total
N inputs, whereas manure and fertilizer N application accounted 9 % and
8 %, respectively. At the regional scale, hotspots of manure N deposition
remained largely similar during the period 1860–2016 (i.e., southern Asia,
Africa and South America); however, hotspots of manure and fertilizer N
application shifted from Europe to southern Asia in the early 21st century.
The new three global datasets contribute to the filling of the previous data gaps of global
and regional N inputs in pastures and rangelands, improving the abilities of
ecosystem and earth system models to investigate the global impacts of N
enrichment due to agriculture, in terms of associated greenhouse gas
emissions and environmental sustainability issues. Datasets are available at
https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.892940 .
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