The latest Great Barrier Reef report shows some improvements to water quality over the past five years, but there’s still a lot to do on one particular problem: nitrogen.
How to trim agriculture’s global warming footprint?
Neil Howard
About 10% of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions come from farming. Researchers are working on ways to address this piece of the global warming puzzle.
Good for plants, bad for the atmosphere.
Roadsidepictures
Carbon dioxide is the “face” of the greenhouse gases, but nitrous oxide (N2O) merits its own spotlight. The same “laughing gas” once used by dentists as an anaesthetic and used today by people looking…
Australian farmers apply nearly a million tonnes of nitrogen-based fertilisers every year.
Pete Hill/Flickr
Peter Grace, Queensland University of Technology and Louise Barton, The University of Western Australia
When we talk about greenhouse gases we usually talk about carbon dioxide. When media reports depict climate change, we invariably see the cooling towers of a coal power station. Which is fair, because…
Enjoy the color while you can before climate change makes a mess of this too.
chensiyuan
One of nature’s most spectacular events occurs every autumn, when the leaves of hardwood trees burst into brilliant color before falling to the ground. These autumnal displays in the eastern United States…
If Earth were like a human body, large animals might be its arteries, moving nutrients from where they’re abundant to where they’re needed. Currently the planet has large regions where life is limited…
Plants that breathe nitrogen.
University of Nottingham
Each year more than 1 million tonnes of mineral nitrogen fertiliser is applied to arable and grass crops in the UK. This pollutes waterways through nitrate run-off and the atmosphere from the release of…
Overuse of nitrogen fertiliser can have nasty environmental consequences.
eutrophication&hypoxia/Flickr
Planet Earth has boundaries for its biophysical subsystems. By 2009, we had already exceeded three of the boundaries – climate change, biodiversity loss, and the nitrogen cycle. Climate change is a top-of-mind…