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Towards a standardised procedure for determining the potentially mineralisable nitrogen of soil

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Abstract

Reliable techniques for predicting N mineralisation dynamics in soil are required for sustainable management of land resources. The concept of potentially mineralisable N (N 0 ) and its determination procedures were re-appraised in this study. Leaching soil before incubation removed considerable amounts of soluble organic N. But the leached soils had higher rates of net N mineralisation than the unleached controls during a subsequent 2-week incubation, suggesting that using the total amount of leached- (organic + inorganic) N for calculating N 0 may not be warranted. N 0 and the mineralisation rate constant k estimated with the conventional model-fitting technique varied significantly with soil, incubation time, temperature and moisture, without consistent trends. To obtain an N 0 value that is unequivocally indicative of soil N mineralisation capacity, the incubation should be conducted under standardised temperature (35°C) and moisture (55–65% water holding capacity or –30 to –10 kPa) conditions, and a standard mineralisation rate constant (=0.054 week–1) should be used for all soils. Assuming that N 0 for a soil does not change with environmental conditions, its value was then fixed as a constant when fitting the first-order kinetic model to estimate k under non-standard conditions. This technique eliminated the confounding relationship between N 0 and k, which is inherent in the conventional curve-fitting procedure, and thus basically precluded the effect of incubation time on N 0 estimation. The resultant N 0 represents not only the quantity, but also the quality of substrates and their interaction with the soil matrix. The k values showed close and consistent relationships with temperature and moisture.

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Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge support from the University of Melbourne and CSIRO in providing funds and facilities. We thank Dr. P.M. Chalk (IAEA, Vienna) for his support for the initiation of this research. We are also grateful to Dr. Ram Dalal and Dr. Phil Moody (QNR&M) for reviewing the manuscript.

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Correspondence to W. J. Wang.

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Wang, W.J., Smith, C.J. & Chen, D. Towards a standardised procedure for determining the potentially mineralisable nitrogen of soil. Biol Fertil Soils 37, 362–374 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00374-003-0604-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00374-003-0604-7

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