Agriculture in Lower Saxony is facing a variety of changes,including water shortages caused by climate change, rising fertilizer costs, and societal demands for reduced environmental impact. Various adaptation measures could help address these challenges. For example,
(i) Deep-rooted legumes provide nitrogen at low cost and improve soil structure,
(ii) Reduced tillage can help adapt to water scarcity and
(iii) Increased incorporation of organic matter can improve nutrient availability and topsoil structure.
The effectiveness of such measures and their combination depends on local site conditions. It is therefore necessary to test their performance under limited nutrient and water supply in representative agricultural conditions in Lower Saxony.
This subproject will therefore investigate the effects of a mixture of deep-rooted plants and legumes used as cover crops in an existing sugar beet crop rotation trial near Göttingen. In addition, drought stress conditions will be simulated by setting up so-called “rain-out shelters.” An interdisciplinary team of soil physicists, soil chemists, and agricultural scientists will work together on the analysis.
Findings regarding the effects on soil structure, the water balance, the dynamics of organic carbon and nitrogen in the soil, sugar beet root growth, and the agronomic crop rotation balance will be presented at the end of the project. In addition, the project will complement ongoing ZERN studies.This includes a long-term fertilization trial that examines the effects of different crop residue management practices on nutrient dynamics and is used to develop strategies for adjusting management practices. In addition, an ongoing experiment on reduced tillage is being supplemented by drone-based infrared imaging to measure drought stress in crops.
In addition, remote sensing experts will work on analyzing hyperspectral data from drones and satellites to enable ground monitoring at the field to regional level.
Once these newly available methods have been developed and calibrated for local conditions, the impacts of the tested adaptation measures will be assessed at the landscape level in Lower Saxony.
The contact persons for this subproject are: Prof. Dr. Stephan Peth (peth@ifbk.uni-hannover.de), Prof. Dr. Sabine Chabrillat (chabrillat@ifbk.uni-hannover.de), Prof. Dr. Georg Guggenberger (guggenberger@ifbk.uni-hannover.de), PD Dr. Anna Jacobs (jacobs@ifz-goettingen.de) and Prof. Dr. Anne-Katrin Mahlein (mahlein@ifz-goettingen.de)
…more information to follow…