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The nitrogen cycle is of particular interest to ecologists because nitrogen availability can affect the rate of key ecosystem processes, including primary production and decomposition. Human activities such as fossil fuel combustion, use of artificial nitrogen fertilizers, and release of nitrogen in wastewater have dramatically altered the ...
The nitrogen cycle is one of the Earth's biogeochemical cycles. It involves the conversion of nitrogen into different chemical forms. The main processes of the nitrogen cycle are the fixation, ammonification, nitrification, and denitrification. As one of the macronutrients, nitrogen plays an important role in plant growth.
Like nitrogen, phosphorus is involved with many vital plant processes. Within a plant, it is present mainly as a structural component of the nucleic acids: deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA), as well as a constituent of fatty phospholipids, that are important in membrane development and function. It is present in both ...
A nutrient cycle (or ecological recycling) is the movement and exchange of inorganic and organic matter back into the production of matter. Energy flow is a unidirectional and noncyclic pathway, whereas the movement of mineral nutrients is cyclic.
As part of the nitrogen cycle, it is essential for soil fertility and the growth of terrestrial and semiaquatic vegetations, upon which all consumers of those ecosystems rely for biomass. Nitrogen fixation is thus crucial to the food security of human societies in sustaining agricultural yields (especially staple crops ), livestock feeds ...
The Haber–Bosch process is one of the largest contributors to a buildup of reactive nitrogen in the biosphere, causing an anthropogenic disruption to the nitrogen cycle. [74] Since nitrogen use efficiency is typically less than 50%, [75] farm runoff from heavy use of fixed industrial nitrogen disrupts biological habitats. [4] [76]
Microbial decomposition releases nitrogen compounds from dead organic matter in the soil, where plants, fungi, and bacteria compete for it. Some soil bacteria use organic nitrogen-containing compounds as a source of carbon, and release ammonium ions into the soil. This process is known as nitrogen mineralization.
Nitrogen is an element vital to many environmental processes. Nitrogen plays a vital role in the nitrogen cycle, a complex biogeochemical process that involves the transformation of nitrogen between different chemical forms and its movement through various environmental compartments such as the atmosphere, soil, water, and living organisms. [1]