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Nitrogen's effects on agriculture profoundly influence crop growth, soil fertility, and overall agricultural productivity, while also exerting significant impacts on the environment. 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 ...
Human impact on the nitrogen cycle is diverse. Agricultural and industrial nitrogen (N) inputs to the environment currently exceed inputs from natural N fixation. [1] As a consequence of anthropogenic inputs, the global nitrogen cycle (Fig. 1) has been significantly altered over the past century.
Increasing levels of nitrogen deposition is shown to have several adverse effects on both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. [52] [53] Nitrogen gases and aerosols can be directly toxic to certain plant species, affecting the aboveground physiology and growth of plants near large point sources of nitrogen pollution. Changes to plant species may ...
Leached agricultural inputs, i.e. fertilizers and manures, accounts for 75% of the anthropogenic source of nitrogen. [4] The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates world demand for nitrogen fertilizers will increase by 1.7% annually between 2011 and 2015. An increase of 7.5 million tonnes.
Excess nitrogen can disrupt mutualisms; for example, in the legumes-rhizobia resource mutualism nitrogen deposition results in the evolution of less-cooperative rhizobia. [22] Because of the increase in decomposition in the soil, its organic matter content will be depleted which results in lower overall soil health. [23]
Nutrient pollution, a form of water pollution, refers to contamination by excessive inputs of nutrients.It is a primary cause of eutrophication of surface waters (lakes, rivers and coastal waters), in which excess nutrients, usually nitrogen or phosphorus, stimulate algal growth. [1]
Nitrogen fixation is thus crucial to the food security of human societies in sustaining agricultural yields (especially staple crops), livestock feeds (forage or fodder) and fishery (both wild and farmed) harvests.
The environmental impact of agriculture involves impacts on a variety of different factors: the soil, water, the air, animal and soil variety, people, plants, and the food itself. Agriculture contributes to a number larger of environmental issues that cause environmental degradation including: climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss ...