Nutrient saturation of crop monocultures and agroforestry indicated by nutrient response efficiency
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Nutrient saturation of crop monocultures and agroforestry indicated by nutrient response efficiency Marcus Schmidt . Marife D. Corre . Bomin Kim . Julia Morley . Leonie Go¨bel . Anuja S. I. Sharma . Sıˆnziana Setriuc . Edzo Veldkamp
Received: 22 June 2020 / Accepted: 7 December 2020 Ó The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Efficient use of nutrients is a key requisite for a sustainable intensification of agriculture in order to meet the increasing global crop demand while minimizing deleterious environmental impacts. Agroforestry systems exhibit tree–crop interactions, which potentially contribute to nutrient-efficient agroecosystems. Our goal was to determine whether the conversion from cropland monocultures to alleycropping agroforestry increases nutrient response efficiency (NRE), the ability of plants to convert available nutrients into biomass. We found that crop yield, plant-available nutrients and NRE were comparable between agroforestry and monocultures, but the trees in agroforestry had high NRE, contributing to nutrient retention of the agroforestry systems as a whole. The unimodal relationship of the crops’ NRE with plant-available nutrients suggests that NRE values were beyond optimum in both agroforestry and monoculture indicating nutrient saturation. This indicates that fertilizer inputs can be reduced (or
Supplementary Information The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10705-020-10113-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. M. Schmidt (&) M. D. Corre B. Kim J. Morley L. Go¨bel A. S. I. Sharma S. Setriuc E. Veldkamp Soil Science of Tropical and Subtropical Ecosystems, University of Goettingen, Buesgenweg 2, 37077 Go¨ttingen, Germany e-mail: [email protected]
optimized) without sacrificing crop yield or profit. Based on the NRE curves, we assessed that a reduction of plant-available N by 50% would lead to a decrease in crop yield by 17% and a concomitant increase in N response efficiency by 67%, whereas a similar reduction of plant-available P would lead to a decrease in crop yield by 8% with an increase in P response efficiency by 83%. An optimized fertilization to achieve such lower levels of plant-available nutrients will have beneficial effects on nutrient retention and redistribution. Optimizing fertilizer input will make alley-cropping agroforestry a productive and profitable agro-ecosystem that contributes to an ecologically sustainable agriculture. Keywords Environmentally sustainable agriculture Alley-cropping agroforestry Cropland monoculture Soil nutrient stock Soil organic carbon stock
Introduction Global food production has increased in the past decades, following the demands of a growing world population (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 2015). Concomitantly, fertilizer use has increased disproportionately with productivity, resulting in decreasing fertilizer use efficiency and
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Nutr Cycl Agroecosyst
deleterious effects on
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