T. Dalgaard

Aarhus University | AU · Department of Agroecology

Globally, food production for an ever-growing population is a well-known threat to the environment due to losses of excess reactive nitrogen (N) from agriculture. Since the 1980s, many countries of the Global North, such as Denmark, have successfully combatted N pollution in the aquatic environment by regulation and introduction of national agricul...

Monitoring networks show that the European Union Nitrates Directive (ND) has had mixed success in reducing nitrate concentrations in groundwater. By combining machine learning and monitored nitrate concentrations (1992–2019), we estimate the total area of nitrate hotspots in Europe to be 401,000 km2, with 47% occurring outside of Nitrate Vulnerable...

Mitigating nitrogen leaching from agricultural land is imperative for enhancing the ecological status of aquatic ecosystems. Incorporating the knowledge and perceptions of farmers regarding the feasibility and effectiveness of implementing nitrogen reduction measures is vital for increasing the adoption rate of such measures and related policies. C...

Monitoring networks show that the European Union Nitrates Directive (ND) has had mixed success in reducing nitrate concentrations in groundwater. By combining machine learning and monitored nitrate concentrations (1992-2019), we estimate the nitrate hotspot area in Europe to be 401,000 km2, with 47% occurring outside of Nitrate Vulnerable Zones (NV...

Irrigation, one of the 28 agri-environmental indicators defined in the European Common Agricultural Policy, is often neglected in agricultural nitrogen (N) budgets, while it can be a considerable source of N in irrigated agriculture. The annual N input from irrigation water sources (NIrrig) to cropping systems was quantified for Europe for 2000-201...

The effects of climate change are instigating a discourse shift towards net-zero emissions agriculture. However, a sectoral silo paradigm of policy design is incompatible with a systems approach to address complex global environmental challenges. This study introduces a social cartography approach that amalgamates network theory with a nexus perspe...

Greenhouse agriculture has become vitally important in promoting sustainable food supplies globally, especially by encouraging local production and consumption practices. However, it also represents an industry with a high risk for groundwater pollution due to much higher application limits allowed for nitrogen fertilizers compared to conventional...

Soils form the basis for agricultural production and other ecosystem services, and soil management should aim at improving their quality and resilience. Within the SoilCare project, the concept of soil-improving cropping systems (SICS) was developed as a holistic approach to facilitate the adoption of soil management that is sustainable and profita...

Context Agricultural activities constitute the most significant source of nitrate pollution, posing a threat to water quality and ecosystem services. The Nitrates Directive is an integral feature of the Water Framework Directive, which seeks to reduce nitrate pollution from agricultural sources. Directive compliance has proven to be problematic for...

Better nitrogen management, technologies, and regulation are required to reduce nitrogen losses in the aquatic environment. New innovative technologies can support farmers in a more targeted planning of fertilizer application and crop management at the field level to increase the effect of measures when reducing nitrogen losses. However, if farmers...

The aim of deliverable D3.1 was to make an initial introductory review of research projects and the wider literature on the topic of mixed farming in Europe, to use as a go-to resource for the further work in the MIXED Project and parallel research projects. A literature review covering a large and broad topic such as ‘mixed farming systems’ is cha...

In this article, drawing on the discursive psychology of Rom Harré, we show how mapping the exchange of words among people might disclose a complex reality; not merely that which farmers explicitly talk ‘about’ but the reality implicitly at stake within the communication. More specifically, we show how discourses involving modern farmers reveal an...

ContextExcess use of nitrogen fertilizer in agricultural landscapes is a threat to aquatic ecosystems, with effects manifesting at the scale of watersheds encompassing many farms. Collaborative processes involving farmers may be needed to achieve policies and decisions that are legitimate and sustainable in the long-term. Doing so depends on how ar...

Regulation of nitrogen (N) loss from the agri-environment is a global challenge with dire consequences for food production and environmental management. This is also the case in Denmark where regulation largely relies on general measures for reducing N inputs. These measures have significantly reduced nitrogen emissions, but further reduction is ne...

Natural wetlands used to cover a significant part of the landscape, but these ecosystems have declined by >50% worldwide, and even more in Denmark and Sweden. However, since the 1980s, various policies have been implemented to restore and create wetlands. This study provides a comprehensive historical overview of policies used to stimulate the crea...

Wetland decline under post-European settlement and land use change across western Canada has led to mitigation strategies, including wetland creation. Created wetlands can trigger environmental change, including woody species encroachment, in turn altering vegetation and soil. We quantify changes in shrub abundance from prior to wetland creation (1...

The aim of this chapter is to present the Danish Nitrogen Mitigation Assessment (www.DNMARK.org), an ongoing five-year multidisciplinary research alliance, focusing on the quantification of nitrogen (N) flows and solutions scenarios for a more sustainable N use in Denmark. As one of the world’s most agriculturally intensive countries, with a long N...

Diffuse nitrogen (N) pollution from agriculture in groundwater and surface water is a major challenge in terms of meeting drinking water targets in many parts of Europe. A bottom-up approach involving local stakeholders may be more effective than national- or European-level approaches for addressing local drinking water issues. Common understanding...

The most significant source of nitrate pollution in the European Union (EU) is attributed to agricultural activities, which threaten drinking water, marine, and freshwater resources. The Nitrates Directive is a key feature of the Water Framework Directive (WFD), which seeks to reduce nitrate pollution from agricultural sources. Yet, weak compliance...

Soil quality is in decline in many parts of the world, in part due to the intensification of agricultural practices. Whilst economic instruments and regulations can help incentivise uptake of more sustainable soil management practices, they rarely motivate long-term behavior change when used alone. There has been increasing attention towards the co...

Soil quality is in decline in many parts of the world, in part due to the intensification of agricultural practices. Whilst economic instruments and regulations can help incentivise uptake of more sustainable soil management practices, they rarely motivate long-term behavior change when used alone. There has been increasing attention towards the co...

Soil quality is in decline in many parts of the world, in part due to the intensification of agricultural practices. Whilst economic instruments and regulations can help incentivise uptake of more sustainable soil management practices, they rarely motivate long-term behavior change when used alone. There has been increasing attention towards the co...

Pollution of ground-and surface waters with nitrates from agricultural sources poses a risk to drinking water quality and has negative impacts on the environment. At the national scale, the gross nitrogen budget (GNB) is accepted as an indicator of pollution caused by nitrates. There is, however, little common EU-wide knowledge on the budget applic...

Humanity's transformation of the nitrogen cycle has major consequences for ecosystems, climate and human health, making it one of the key environmental issues of our time. Understanding how trends could evolve over the course of the 21st century is crucial for scientists and decision-makers from local to global scales. Scenario analysis is the prim...

Soil quality is in decline in many parts of the world, in part due to the intensification of agricultural practices. Whilst economic instruments and regulations can help incentivise uptake of more sustainable soil management practices, they rarely motivate long-term behavior change when used alone. We are now beginning to pay attention to the compl...

Good soil quality implies the maintenance of properties at levels capable of ensuring an equilibrated and healthy ecosystem, with sustained agricultural production to supply the world population. Climate change, land-use change, and agriculture intensification are causing a decline in soil quality, which in most parts of the world is becoming sever...

The overall aim of this report is to gather knowledge from ongoing and completed major Danish research projects and initiatives on how to assess nitrogen (N) retention in the subsurface. This new knowledge is important for implementing a more targeted N-regulation in Denmark in the future, as expressed in the political agreement from 2018 (MFVM, 20...

Nitrogen (N) leaching from agricultural areas in the form of nitrate (NO3-) is one of the most dominant sources of eutrophication in coastal waters. This environmental pressure is expected to intensify with the predicted increase in food demand, highlighting the need for developing novel ways to reduce N loads from agriculture. This may be achieved...

Livestock production is one of the most water-use-intensive economic sectors globally, and pork is the biggest of all meat sectors, necessitating continuous improvement of the sector's water use. Environmental product declarations are one way of incentivizing environmental performance, but with the majority of the water use occurring in primary pig...

Close to 60 per cent of the Danish land area is used for arable farming. EU regulations as well as public preferences create increasing pressures for changing agricultural land use in a more environmentally sustainable direction incorporating the multiple ecosystem services affected by agriculture. In this paper we present a spatially explicit mult...

This paper evaluates the environmental impacts of different alternatives for handling of sludge from paper and pulp mills in Sweden, using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The common practice of incineration of biosludge with energy recovery followed by landfilling of ash (System A) was compared with the alternative of digesting sludge anaerobically to...

During the past twenty years, the Nordic countries (Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway) have introduced a range of measures to reduce losses of nitrogen (N) to air and to aquatic environment by leaching and runoff. However, the agricultural sector is still an important N source to the environment, and projections indicate relatively small emission...

Current research on, e.g. agricultural supply-chains, engages in implementing new technologies enabling extraction of protein from other sources than soya such as grass, clover, or alfalfa. Still, it is not obvious where to initiate production of the biorefinery crop without damaging existing ecological systems or maybe even to strengthen local env...

Scenario-building is a widely used tool to initiate discussions on future land uses. In scenarios possible futures can be explored and peoples' ideas as well as societal trends can be visualized by the use of maps, pictures and figures. With focus on agricultural nitrogen management, and point of departure in the farmers' decisions-regarding fertil...

Sweden is one of the largest exporters of pulp and paper products in the world. It follows that huge quantities of sludge rich in carbonaceous organic material and containing heavy metals are generated. This paper carried out a comparative environmental analysis of three different technologies, which can be adopted to produce biochar and recover en...

Human utilisation of natural resources is the most important direct driver of land cover patterns in the Anthropocene. Here, we present a conceptual framework for how the effects of geophysical drivers (e.g., topography, soil, climate, and hydrology) and socio‐technical drivers (e.g., technology, legal regulation, economy, and culture) on land use...

To comply with the EU Water Framework Directive, Denmark must further reduce the nitrate (N)-load to marine ecosystems from agricultural areas. Under the anticipated future spatially targeted regulation, the required N-load reductions will differ between catchments, and these are expected to be mitigated by a combination of land and water managemen...

Data S1 A semi‐structured interview format

Spatially detailed information on agricultural nitrogen (N) budgets is relevant to identify regions where there is a need for a reduction in inputs in view of various forms of N pollution. However, at the scale of the European Union, there is a lack of consistent, reliable, high spatial resolution data necessary for the calculation of regional N lo...

Denmark is one of the largest contributors of agricultural nitrogen (N) discharges to the Baltic Sea measured in terms of N-load per hectare. Many N mitigation measures have already been implemented in Denmark since the 1980s, but this has been insufficient to meet the environmental objectives without adversely affecting agricultural production. To...

This report provides an overview on new technologies for integrate sustainable and resilient management practices in arable ecosystems for advanced farmers, consultants, NGOs and policy makers. By following sustainable soil management strategies, which consider the site- and field-specific parameters and agricultural machinery’s improvements, it is...

Soils are vital for supporting food security and other ecosystem services. Climate change can affect soil functions both directly and indirectly. Direct effects include temperature, precipitation, and moisture regime changes. Indirect effects include those that are induced by adaptations such as irrigation, crop rotation changes, and tillage practi...

This study evaluates environmental impacts of an integrated mixed crop-livestock system with a green biorefinery (GBR). System integration included production of feed crops and green biomasses (Sys-I) to meet the demand of a livestock system (Sys-III) and to process green biomasses in a GBR system (Sys-II). Processing of grass-clover to produce fee...

Nutrient loss from agriculture is the largest source of diffuse water pollution in Denmark. To reduce nutrient loads a number of solutions have been implemented, but this has been insufficient to achieve the environmental objectives without unacceptable repercussions for agricultural production. This has substantiated the need to develop a new appr...

This study evaluates the environmental impacts of biorefinery products using consequential (CLCA) and attributional (ALCA) life cycle assessment (LCA) approaches. Within ALCA, economic allocation method was used to distribute impacts among the main products and the coproducts, whereas within the CLCA system expansion was adopted to avoid allocation...

To mitigate climate change it is necessary to further increase the deployment of renewable energy, including bioenergy. This analysis shows how this can be achieved in Danish agriculture and forestry before 2020. The key is a sustainable intensification and we show through three scenarios how it is possible to increase production while at the same...

Throughout the world, nitrogen (N) losses from intensive agricultural production may end up as undesirably high concentrations of nitrate in groundwater with a long-term impact on groundwater quality. This has human and environmental health consequences, due to the use of groundwater as a drinking water resource, and causes eutrophication of ground...

Wetlands provide a range of ecosystem services such as drought resistance, flood resistance, nutrient deposition, biodiversity, etc. This study presents a new multi-criteria, ecosystems service value-driven method to drive the optimal placement of restored wetlands in terms of maximizing selected ecosystem services which a wetland can provide or af...

In 2014, a radical shift took place in Danish water planning. Following years of a top-down water planning approach, 23 regional water councils were established to co-create and provide input to Danish authorities on the development of River Basin Management Plans (RBMP). The water councils advised local authorities on the application of measures t...

The current study aimed at evaluating potential environmental impacts for the production of willow, alfalfa and straw from spring barley as feedstocks for bioenergy or biorefinery systems. A method of Life Cycle Assessment was used to evaluate based on the following impact categories: Global Warming Potential (GWP100), Eutrophication Potential (EP)...

The aim of this study is to assess the potential environmental impacts of producing maize, grass-clover, ryegrass, and straw from winter wheat as biomass feedstocks for biorefinery. The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method included the following impact categories: Global Warming Potential (GWP100), Eutrophication Potential (EP), Non-Renewable Energy...

Nutrient loadings of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) to aquatic environments are of increasing concern globally for managing ecosystems, drinking water supply and food production. There are often multiple sources of these nutrients in the landscape, and the different hydrological flow patterns within stream or river catchments have considerable inf...

Under the Water Framework Directive, public participation was identified as a key part of water planning. This caused a paradigm shift in Danish water planning. Water councils in River Basin Districts were established to provide public input on how to improve the physical conditions in streams. A study of the water councils found that Denmark has c...

This report is an updated version of the + 10 mio tonnes study published in 2013. The need to create sustainable solutions in the energy sector initiated collaboration between scientists at the University of Copenhagen, Aarhus University and R&D staff from DONG Energy. An agreement on funding by DONG Energy for an independent study on expansion of...

Nitrogen (N) management presents a sustainability dilemma: N is strongly linked to energy and food production, but excess reactive N causes environmental pollution. The N footprint is an indicator that quantifies reactive N losses to the environment from consumption and production of food and the use of energy. The average per capita N footprint (c...

Ruminant production systems are important producers of food, support rural communities and culture, and help to maintain a range of ecosystem services including the sequestering of carbon in grassland soils. However, these systems also contribute significantly to climate change through greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, while intensification of produc...

The Netherlands and Denmark are the two biggest pig meat exporters in Europe, both with a strong focus on the German market. The structure of pig farms is very different: an average Danish pig farm has 3500 pigs, 170 ha of agricultural land on which a major part of the feed cereals are grown, whereas a typical Dutch pig farm has 2500 pigs with only...