Nitrogen Transportation and Transformation under Different Soil Water and Salinity Conditions

Abstract

Soil nitrogen transportation and transformation are important processes for crop growth and environmental protection, and they are influenced by various environmental factors and human interventions. This study aims to determine the effects of irrigation and soil salinity levels on nitrogen transportation and transformation using two types of experiments: column and incubation. The HYDRUS-1D model and an empirical model were used to simulate the nitrogen transportation and transformation processes. HYDRUS-1D performed well in the simulation of nitrogen transportation and transformation under irrigated conditions (R2 as high as 0.944 and 0.763 for ammonium and nitrate-nitrogen simulations, respectively). In addition, the empirical model was able to attain accurate estimations for ammonium (R2 = 0.512-0.977) and nitrate-nitrogen (R2 = 0.410-0.679) without irrigation. The modelling results indicated that saline soil reduced the rate of urea hydrolysis to ammonium, promoted the longitudinal dispersity of nitrogen and enhanced the adsorption of ammonium-nitrogen. Furthermore, the effects of soil salinity on the nitrification rate were not obviously comparable to the effects of the amount of irrigation water. Without irrigation, the hydrolysis rate of urea to ammonium decreased exponentially with the soil salinity (R2 = 0.787), although the nitrification coefficient varied with salinity. However, the denitrification coefficient increased linearly with salinity (R2 = 0.499).