Improving Nitrogen Fertilization Recommendations in Temperate Agricultural Systems: A Study on Walloon Soils Using Anaerobic Incubation and POxC
(2025) Nitrogen — Vol. 6, n° 4, p. 91 (2025)
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- Crops nitrogen supply through the in situ mineralization of soil organic matter is a critical process for plant nutrition. However, accurately estimating the contribution of mineralization remains challenging. The complexity of biological, chemical, and physical processes in the soil, influenced by environmental conditions, makes it difficult to precisely quantify the amount of nitrogen available for crops. In this study, we created a database by collecting results from 121 mineralization monitoring experiments carried out between 2015 and 2021 on different experimental plots across Wallonia, Southern Belgium, and assessed the efficiency of predictive mineralization methods. The most impactful analytical parameters on in situ mineralization (ISM), determined using LIXIM program, appeared to be potentially mineralizable nitrogen (PMN) (r = 0.79). PMN, estimated by anaerobic soil incubation, also allowed the effective consideration of the after-effects of grassland termination and manure inputs. A multiple linear regression (MLR) combining PMN, POxC, pH, TOC:N, and TOC:clay significantly improved the prediction of soil nitrogen mineralization available for crops, achieving r = 0.87 (vs. r = 0.58 for the current method), while reducing dispersion by 41% (RMSE 56.35 → 33.13 kg N·ha−1). The use of a more flexible Bootstrap Forest model (BFM) further enhanced performance, reaching r = 0.92 and a 50.8% reduction in dispersion compared to the current method (RMSE 56.35 → 27.76 kg N·ha−1), i.e., about 16% lower RMSE than the MLR. Those models provided practical and efficient tools to better manage nitrogen resources in temperate agricultural systems.
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Cugnon, T., De Toffoli, M., Mahillon, J., & Lambert, R. (2025). Improving Nitrogen Fertilization Recommendations in Temperate Agricultural Systems: A Study on Walloon Soils Using Anaerobic Incubation and POxC. Nitrogen, 6(4), 91. https://doi.org/10.3390/nitrogen6040091 (Original work published 2025)