Modelling Nitrous Oxide Emissions from Grazed Grasslands in New Zealand

Spatial and temporal variability are major difficulties when quantifying annual N2O fluxes at the field scale. New Zealand currently relies on the IPCC default methodology (National Inventory Report, 2004). This methodology is too simplistic and generalised as it ignores all site-specific controls, but is also not sufficiently flexible to allow mitigation options to be assessed. Therefore, a more robust, process-based approach is required to quantify N2O emissions more accurately at the field level. Denitrification-decomposition (DNDC) is a process-based model originally developed (Li et al., 1992) to quantify agricultural nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions across climatic zones, soil types, and management regimes. This has been modified to represent New Zealand grazed grassland systems (Saggar et al., 2004). More recent modifications include measured biomass C and N parameters in perennial pasture and compaction impacts on the soil water dynamics. Further validation tests have been conducted against observed soil moisture and gas fluxes. Here we i) assess the ability of a modified DNDC model NZ-DNDC to simulate N2O emissions; ii) compare the measured, modelled and IPCCestimated N2O emissions from dairy- and sheep-grazed pastures; and iii) give preliminary results for upscaling the model to provide preliminary regional emissions estimates