Award details

Modelling agricultural biogeochemical cycles

Reference	BBS/E/C/00004671
Principal Investigator / Supervisor	Professor Andrew Whitmore
Co-Investigators / Co-Supervisors
Institution	Rothamsted Research
Department	Rothamsted Research Department
Funding type	Research
Value (£)	493,860
Status	Completed
Type	Institute Project
Start date	01/04/2004
End date	31/03/2008
Duration	48 months

Abstract

Our understanding of the physical processes affecting soil stability, organic matter dynamics and nutrient supply is reasonably good at the microscale. Translating this understanding into models and prediction of the behaviour of soil at the field scale and greater is hampered by spatial variability and the interactions between processes. This project seeks to distil out the most important interactions between nutrients and water use in managed land and relate to work elsewhere in RRes and IGER on spatial dependence of soil properties with a view to building reliable predictive models of soil behaviour at the larger scales. Science functions by devising hypotheses and then experiments to test (falsify) those hypotheses. Results confirm or reject the original ideas and then suggest new research to test modified hypotheses and so on. Because agricultural research is carried out over long time-scales, it does not easily lend itself to such sequential analysis and experimental design has evolved to test treatment effects efficiently. Despite this, some dynamic models of environmental processes now function over short time-scales, e.g. the decomposition of crop residues or the reduction of nitrate in soil. It then becomes useful to devise experiments that test fewer treatments but distinguish between proposed mechanisms. The science of model discrimination can not only suggest which model of a series is the best, but can examine the differences between candidate models over the whole of the dataspace and predict where the difference between models is expected to be greatest. It is at these data points that future experimentation should be concentrated.

Summary

unavailable

Committee	Closed Committee - Agri-food (AF)
Research Topics	X – not assigned to a current Research Topic
Research Priority	X – Research Priority information not available
Research Initiative	X - not in an Initiative
Funding Scheme	X – not Funded via a specific Funding Scheme

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