N2Onet: a global collaborative network facilitating advances in measurement, modeling, and mitigation of agricultural soil nitrous oxide emissions

Nitrogen (N) fertilizer supports global agriculture but its use and overuse drive emissions of nitrous oxide (N₂O), a potent and long-lived trace gas. Incomplete understanding of N₂O flux drivers makes it difficult to make spatiotemporal emissions predictions and evaluate management strategies for emissions reductions. N₂O experts evaluated current sources of uncertainty and propose an initiative for accelerating advances in N₂O measurement, analysis, and mitigation.

In a study led by the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI), researchers identified major scientific uncertainties underlying the understanding of N₂O flux drivers, including poor process-based understanding of controls on soil N₂O emissions in the field, insufficient data to reduce uncertainty in N₂O budgets from field to regional scales, and high uncertainty in model predictions of soil N₂O emissions across environmental and management conditions. To reduce these uncertainties, they proposed the concept of N₂Onet, a global collaborative initiative to accelerate advances in N₂O measurement, analysis, and mitigation.

N₂Onet will serve as an observational network of supersites with multi-scale measurements, a database hub for N₂O flux and ancillary data, and a catalyst for community building, information sharing, and training.

N₂Onet will provide a roadmap for reducing agricultural N₂O emissions worldwide by coalescing and coordinating the global community of N₂O researchers.

This work was funded in part by CABBI, a U.S. Department of Energy-funded Bioenergy Research Center, with a grant from the DOE Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research Program.

Images available upon request.