Climate-smart agriculture aims to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and increase the removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Mitigating the emissions of the strong greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O) is challenging because the emissions are episodic and depend strongly on weather and management-history. The highest emissions occur during wetting of dry soils and freezing and thawing in the winter, however, understanding of these “hot moments” remains poor. We have formed a multi-disciplinary consortium that conducts field and laboratory studies to determine the episodic N2O emissions, their seasonality, drivers and processes in northern agricultural soils. With this new understanding we improve current cropland models to enable predicting the emissions and enabling emission mitigation in current and in future climate.

2024

2028