0000000000404355
AUTHOR
Alessandro Peressotti
Impact of woody encroachment on soil organic carbon and nitrogen in abandoned agricultural lands along a rainfall gradient in Italy
Land use changes represent one of the most important components of global environmental change andhave a strong influence on carbon cycling. As a consequence of changes in economy during the last century, areas of marginal agriculture have been abandoned leading to secondary successions. The encroachment of woody plants into grasslands, pastures and croplands is generally thought to increase the carbon stored in these ecosystems even though there are evidences for a decrease in soil carbon stocks after land use change. In this paper, we investigate the effects of woody plant invasion on soil carbon and nitrogen stocks along a precipitation gradient (200–2,500 mm) using original data from pa…
Cropland and grassland management
According to the latest National Inventory, the Italian agricultural sector is a source of GHGs with 34.5 Mt of CO2 eq in 2009, corresponding to 7 % of the total emissions (excluding LULUCF). In particular, more than half (19.1 Mt of CO2 eq) are N2O emissions from soils. Although the national methodology is in accordance with Tier 1 and 2 approaches proposed by the IPCC (2006), still empirical emission factors are used to assess the emission from fertilizer (e.g. 0.0125 kg N2O–N kg−1 N from synthetic fertilizers). Disaggregated data at sub-national level, including models and inventory measurement systems required by higher order methods (i.e. Tier 3), are not available in Italy so far and …