Sustainable nitrogen fertilization for agricultural crops developed based on open lab and field experiments with integrated hydrological modelling in near-real-time

Humanity has reached a point where the capacity to live without irreversibly compromising Earth’s resources is questioned. Since the 1980s, both Earth’s population and global food production have been constantly increasing. To face the challenges of increasing food and water demand, agricultural production efficiency must be improved. Initiatives like the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) describe major challenges for clean water and food production. Accordingly, food production and access to clean water must be a priority in the context of sustainable development. To tackle these important challenges to sustainable development, the present project will build on a combination of agricultural field and integrated hydrological modelling experiments. The knowledge obtained in the field and modelling experiments will be ultimately combined to enable the creation of a prototype near-real time decision support tool for sustainable and resilient management of nitrogen fertilization.

In Poland, cereal production is a major component of the national economy. Even though fertilizer use has been restricted since 2017, in 2020 the Polish government still reported a significant trend of increasing nitrogen concentrations in water bodies. Climate change makes agricultural production even more vulnerable and challenging, pushing farmers to overfertilization. Given the fact that 30% of Polish agricultural soils consist of soils highly prone to fertilizer leaching, it comes as no surprise that excessive nutrient loadings are still widely observed. Due to its high mobility, the most applied agricultural fertilizer Nitrogen (N) is the most prone to leaching, and as a result, N (primarily in the form of nitrate) is by far the most widely observed agricultural contaminant in water bodies worldwide, including in Poland and Switzerland.

To tackle these important challenges to sustainable development, the project will build on a combination of field and modelling experiments. The Swiss project partner will focus on the integrated simulation of hydrological fluxes, crop dynamics and nitrogen-cycling. The Polish project partner will focus its research on field experiments in agricultural fields and in the university's outdoor agricultural laboratory. The knowledge obtained in the field and modelling experiments will be ultimately combined to enable the creation of a prototype near-real time decision support tool for sustainable and resilient management of nitrogen fertilization.