Publication Date:
2023-12-16
Description:
Production and application to soils of manure excreta from livestock production 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 degree by 0.5 degree 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-arc minute 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 from the Food and Agricultural Organization database (FAOSTAT). Based on the new data products, we estimated that total N inputs, sum of manure N deposition, manure 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 fill previous data gaps of global and regional N inputs in pastures and rangelands, improving the ability of ecosystem and biogeochemistry models to investigate the global impacts of N enrichment due to agriculture, in terms of associated greenhouse gas emissions and environmental sustainability issues.
Keywords:
File format; File name; File size; Uniform resource locator/link to file
Type:
Dataset
Format:
text/tab-separated-values, 12 data points
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