Wim de Vries

Wageningen University & Research | WUR · Department of Environmental Systems Analysis

There is a global need to improve the environmental performances and circularity of livestock production systems. This relates also to poultry production systems in China, however, the benefits of optimized, more circular systems have not been quantified. Here, we applied a substance flow analysis to estimate the reactive nitrogen (Nr) losses and g...

Cropland is a main source of global nitrogen pollution1,2. Mitigating nitrogen pollution from global croplands is a grand challenge because of the nature of non-point-source pollution from millions of farms and the constraints to implementing pollution-reduction measures, such as lack of financial resources and limited nitrogen-management knowledge...

Context Forest harvest removal may cause nutrient depletion of soils, when removal of essential nutrients, including nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), sulphur (S), calcium (Ca), potassium (K) and magnesium (Mg) exceeds their net input by deposition and weImpacts of acid atmospheric deposition on woodland athering minus leaching. Nutrient removal by har...

The pivotal role of nitrogen to achieve environmental sustainable development goals and transform our food system is recognized in an ambitious nitrogen waste reduction target in the Farm to Fork Strategy of the European Commission. But is this a realistic objective and if so, what are the pathways that lead to success? To answer these questions, w...

Anthropogenic activities have increased atmospheric N, precipitation, and temperature events in terrestrial ecosystems globally, with N deposition increasing by 3-to 5-fold during the previous century. Despite decades of scientific research, no consensus has been achieved on the impact of climate conditions on soil respiration (Rs). Here, we recons...

Excessive agricultural nitrogen use causes environmental problems globally¹, to an extent that it has been suggested that a safe planetary boundary has been exceeded². Earlier estimates for the planetary nitrogen boundary3,4, however, did not account for the spatial variability in both ecosystems’ sensitivity to nitrogen pollution and agricultural...

Elevated inputs of nitrogen (N) fertilizer have played a key role in feeding an increasing global population, but also caused many environmental problems due to emissions of reactive N (Nr) to air and water worldwide, especially in China. To better understand the improvements to N management required to reduce impacts in China, we compiled a long-t...

To gain insight in the environmental impacts of crop, soil and nutrient management, an integrated model framework INITIATOR was developed predicting: (i) emissions of ammonia (NH3) and greenhouse gases (GHG) from agriculture, including animal husbandry and crop production and (ii) accumulation, leaching and runoff of carbon, nutrients (nitrogen, N,...

Soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration through the application of organic amendments (OAs) is considered an important strategy to offset anthropogenic Cv93..0O2 emissions while simultaneously enhancing soil quality and food security. The efficiency of SOC sequestration, however, depends on the priming effect which is influenced by interactions of...

Since the 1980s, the widespread use of N fertilizer has not only resulted in a strong increase in agricultural productivity but also caused a number of environmental problems, induced by excess reactive N emissions. A range of approaches to improve N management for increased agricultural production together with reduced environmental impacts has be...

Soil carbon (C) sequestration plays a vital role in mitigating global climate change. Human activities have vastly increased nitrogen (N) deposition rate in China, which in turn influences belowground C cycle processes. We performed a meta-analysis based on 61 published studies on N addition experiments, including 4072 observations across China, to...

Soil carbon (C) sequestration plays a vital role in mitigating global climate change. Human activities have vastly increased nitrogen (N) deposition rate in China, which in turn influences belowground C cycle processes. We performed a meta-analysis based on 61 published studies on N addition experiments, including 4072 observations across China, to...

Purpose Rapid urbanization has altered regional nutrient cycles and consequently affected soil nutrient availability for plant growth. This study aims to explore the way in which urbanization shapes the spatial patterns of soil phosphorus (P) concentrations as well as the imprint on tree leaf P concentrations across gradients of urban-rural forests...

The impacts of enhanced nitrogen (N) deposition on the global forest carbon (C) sink and other ecosystem services may depend on whether N is deposited in reduced (mainly as ammonium) or oxidized forms (mainly as nitrate) and the subsequent fate of each. However, the fates of the two key reactive N forms and their contributions to forest C sinks are...

Tillage is a common agricultural practice and a critical component of agricultural systems that is frequently employed worldwide in croplands to reduce climatic and soil restrictions while also sustaining various ecosystem services. Tillage can affect a variety of soil-mediated processes, e.g., soil carbon sequestration (SCS) or depletion, greenhou...

Forests play a key role in a bio-based economy by providing renewable materials, mitigating climate change, and accommodating biodiversity. However, forests experience massive increases in stresses in their ecological and socioeconomic environments, threatening forest ecosystem services supply. Alleviating those stresses is hampered by conflicting...

Global urbanization has profoundly altered regional biogeochemical cycles across urban-rural-natural continuums. A better insight in the changes in soil nitrogen (N) properties across urban-rural-natural forests sheds lights on the impacts of urbanization on regional N cycles and ecological consequences. Based on a systematic survey in forest patch...

Nitrogen (N) deposition is known to increase carbon (C) sequestration in N- limited boreal forests. However, the long- term effects of N deposition on ecosystem carbon fluxes have been rarely investigated in old- growth boreal forests. Here we show that decade-l ong experimental N additions significantly stimulated net primary production (NPP) but...

Many Chinese croplands are suffering from soil acidification, defined as a decrease in soil acid neutralizing capacity (ANC), due to over-application of nitrogen (N) fertilizer and removal of base cations (BCs) in crop harvest. The contribution of fertilization and harvesting on soil acidification rates for different cropping systems is, however, s...

Ammonia emissions to the atmosphere have a range of negative impacts on environmental quality, human health, and biodiversity. Despite the considerable efforts in quantifying spatially explicit ammonia emissions, there are significant uncertainties in ammonia emission estimates at regional scales. We aimed to improve the modeling of atmospheric amm...

Is de veerkracht van onze bomen en bossen toereikend om hetere en drogere periodes en aanhoudende bodemverzuring in de toekomst te overleven? Welke bosbeheermaatregelen zijn mogelijk en nodig om de verschillende bosfuncties te behouden? Om deze vragen te beantwoorden en de gevolgen van klimaatverandering en bodemverzuring in kaart te brengen zijn w...

To represent the sustainability of nitrogen management in the Sustainable Development Goals indicator framework, this paper proposes a sustainable nitrogen management index (SNMI). This index combines the performance in N crop yield and N use efficiency (NUE), thereby accounting for the need for both food production and environmental protection. Ap...

The global urban area is expanding continuously, resulting in unprecedented emissions and deposition of reactive nitrogen (N) in urban environments. However, large knowledge gaps remain in the ecological effects of N deposition on urban forests that provide key ecosystem services for an increasing majority of city dwellers. The current understandin...

Functional genes involved in nitrogen (N) cycling regulate soil nitrification, denitrification and N2O emissions. However, the general patterns and variability of N functional genes in response to N addition, and their association with N2O emission have not been synthesized for terrestrial ecosystems. We synthesized 2068 observations from 144 paper...

The impacts of enhanced nitrogen (N) deposition on the global forest carbon (C) sink and other ecosystem services may depend on whether N is deposited in reduced (mainly as ammonium) or oxidized forms (mainly as nitrate) and the subsequent fate of each. However, the fates of the two key reactive N forms and their contributions to forest C sinks are...

Widespread adoption of improved cropland management measures is advocated to increase soil organic carbon (SOC) levels, thereby improving soil fertility and mitigating climate change. However, spatially explicit insight on management impacts is limited, which is crucial for region-specific and climate smart practices. To overcome these limitations,...

Human activities have drastically increased nitrogen (N) deposition onto forests globally. This may have alleviated N limitation and thus stimulated productivity and carbon (C) sequestration in aboveground woody biomass (AGWB), a stable C pool with long turn-over times. This ‘carbon bonus’ of human N use partly offsets the climate impact of human-i...

Sustainable agricultural management implies optimization of resources for crop production while minimizing adverse impacts on the environment. This requires a better understanding of the synergies and trade-offs of agronomic management while accounting for the controlling effects of site-specific factors (covariates). We systematically evaluated 11...

Liming is a long-established and widely used agricultural practice to ameliorate soil acidity and improve crop production. Sustainable liming strategies for regional applications require information on both lime requirements and liming intervals given land use and soil dependent acidification rates. We developed a method to optimize lime requiremen...

Atmospheric nitrogen and sulfur deposition is an important effect of atmospheric pollution and may affect forest ecosystems positively, for example enhancing tree growth, or negatively, for example causing acidification, eutrophication, cation depletion in soil or nutritional imbalances in trees. To assess and design measures to reduce the negative...

While nitrogen inputs are crucial to agricultural production, excess nitrogen contributes to serious ecosystem damage and water pollution. Here, we investigate this trade-off using an integrated modelling framework. We quantify how different nitrogen mitigation options contribute to reconciling food security and compliance with regional nitrogen su...

Maize production in Zambia is characterized by significant yield gaps attributed to nutrient management and climate change threatens to widen these gaps unless agronomic management is optimized. Insights in the impacts of climate change on maize yields and the potential to mitigate negative impacts by crop management are currently lacking for Zambi...

As a response to the increased pressure of global climate change on most ecosystems, national and international agreements aim at creating forests that are productive, resilient to climate change, and that store carbon to mitigate global warming. However, these aims are being challenged by increased tree mortality rates and decreased tree growth ra...

Insight in the phosphorus (P) flows and P balances in the food chain is largely unknown at county scale in China, being the most appropriate spatial unit for nutrient management advice. Here, we examined changes in P flows in the food chain in a typical agricultural county (Quzhou) during 1980–2017, using substance flow analyses. Our results show t...

China is experiencing severe tropospheric ozone pollution, especially during the summer period in cities. Previous studies have assessed the role of meteorological conditions and anthropogenic precursors in shaping the diurnal variation of ozone concentration in some Chinese cities or the spatial patterns of daytime ozone concentration, but less is...

Forest biomass harvesting guidelines help ensure the ecological sustainability of forest residue harvesting for bioenergy and bioproducts, and hence contribute to social license for a growing bioeconomy. Guidelines, typically voluntary, provide a means to achieve outcomes often required by legislation, and must address needs related to local or reg...

Meeting European policy targets for reducing nitrogen (N) pollution while maintaining crop production is a large challenge. Strategies to tackle this dual challenge should assess where reducing N losses is most needed while accounting for variation in agricultural systems and ecosystems' vulnerability to N loading. We used a spatially explicit N ba...

Agricultural production in the EU has increased strongly since the 1940s, partly driven by increased nitrogen (N) fertiliser and manure inputs. Increased N inputs and associated losses, however, adversely affect air and water quality, with widespread impacts on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and human health. Managing these impacts requires kno...

Maize production in Zambia is characterized by significant yield gaps attributed to nutrient management and climate change threatens to widen these gaps unless agronomic management is optimized. Insights in the impacts of climate change on maize yields and the potential to mitigate negative impacts by crop management is currently lacking for Zambia...

Increased inputs of reactive nitrogen (N) by fertiliser production cause adverse effects on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and on human health, through impacts on air, soil and water quality. The best quantified adverse impacts include: (i) the loss of plant diversity in terrestrial ecosystems and excess algal growth in aquatic ecosystems, lead...

Nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) are essential nutrients that widely limit plant growth in global terrestrial ecosystems. Rising atmospheric CO2 generally stimulates terrestrial net primary productivity and consequently may cause or aggravate N and P limitation due to a dilution effect, but the spatial variation of temporal trends in N versus P limi...

Excessive agricultural nitrogen (N) use causes serious environmental problems globally ¹ , to an extent that scientists have claimed that the safe planetary boundary has been exceeded ² . Earlier estimates for the planetary N boundary 3,4 , however, did not account for spatial variability in both ecosystems’ sensitivity to nitrogen pollution and ag...

The substitution of biomass for fossil fuels in energy consumption is a measure to decrease the emissions of greenhouse gases and thereby mitigate global warming. During recent years, this has led to an increasing interest to use tree harvest residues as feedstock for bioenergy. An important concern related to the removal of harvesting residues is,...

Het scholings- en coaching programma Stikstof in de landbouw is een gezamenlijk programma van de groene hogescholen (Aeres Hogeschool, HAS Hogeschool) en Wageningen University & Research/Wageningen Academy in opdracht van het Ministerie van Landbouw, Natuur en Voedselkwaliteit.

Waterkwaliteitsdoelstellingen worden nog lang niet overal gerealiseerd in Nederland. Het concept 7e Actieprogramma voor de Nitraatrichtlijn1 (NAP) stelt daarom maatregelen voor om deze te bereiken. Helaas houden deze onvoldoende rekening met de lokale situatie. Daardoor beïnvloeden ze de inzet en motivatie van boeren negatief. Ook wordt onvoldoende...

Ammonia emissions into the atmosphere have increased substantially in Europe since 1960, primarily due to the intensification of agriculture, as illustrated by enhanced livestock and the use of fertilizers. These associated emissions of reactive nitrogen, particulate matter, and acid deposition have contributed to negative societal impacts on human...

Transdisciplinary approaches that provide holistic views are essential to properly understand soil processes and the importance of soil to society and will be crucial in the future to integrate distinct disciplines into soil studies. A myriad of challenges faces soil science at the beginning of the 2020s. The main aim of this overview is to assess...

Following discussions at the 6th International Nitrogen Conference, Kampala (24th–27th November 2013), the delegates agreed the Kampala Statement-for-Action on Reactive Nitrogen in Africa and Globally. The Statement-for-Action highlights the global challenge of aiming for just enough nitrogen: enough to meet human needs for food, fuel and fibre, wh...

Human interference with the nitrogen cycle has doubled reactive nitrogen inputs to the global biosphere over the past century, leading to changes across multiple environmental issues that require urgent action. Nitrogen fertilizers and biological nitrogen fixation have allowed benefits of increased crop harvest and livestock production, while in so...

Most global strategies for future food security focus on sustainable intensification of production of food and involve an increase of nitrogen (N) fertilizer use, livestock production and risk of N pollution. In this chapter, we explore the potential of sustainable extensification for agriculture in the European Union (EU) and the Netherlands by an...

In the global setting of the International Nitrogen Initiative (INI), the European Centre facilitates enhanced cooperation and integration among European researchers, policy makers and practitioners on environmental issues related to reactive nitrogen. INI-Europe represents a region that is characterized by agronomic challenges posed by high popula...

Humans have altered the natural nitrogen and phosphorus biogeochemical cycles by the massive input of fertilizers to the agricultural system to boost production. As a result a large amount of nitrogen and phosphorus have been mobilised and delivered to the environment, creating threats to aquatic and terrestrial ecosystem functioning and human heal...

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...

Sustainable soil carbon sequestration practices need to be rapidly scaled up and implemented to contribute to climate change mitigation. We highlight that the major potential for carbon sequestration is in cropland soils, especially those with large yield gaps and/or large historic soil organic carbon losses. The implementation of soil carbon seque...

Nitrogen (N) fertilizer-induced soil acidification in Chinese croplands is well-known, but insight in the impacts of different N fertilizer management approaches (fertilizer type and rate) on soil acidification rates is very limited. Here, we conducted a field experiment on a moderate acid soil to quantify soil acidification rates in response to N...

Agricultural management practices have multiple impacts on farming systems, including crop yield, soil fertility parameters such as soil organic carbon (SOC), and environmental quality. Agricultural decision support tools (DSTs) are key in sustainable farm strategies to optimize yield and minimize environmental losses since both the current agroeco...

Plant species occurrence in Europe is affected by changes in nitrogen deposition and climate. Insight into potential future effects of those changes can be derived by a model approach based on field-based empirical evidence on a continental scale. In this paper, we present a newly developed empirical model PROPS, predicting the occurrence probabili...

Effective policy measures are required to control environmental problems caused by nitrogen (N) fertilizer use in intensive crop production systems in China. However, simply reducing the use of N fertilizer in allregions may be detrimental to food security. Here we reviewed N management policies and indicators,with a particular focus on European Un...

Na publicatie van zijn eerste adviesrapport op 5 maart 2020 brengt het Adviescollege Meten en Berekenen Stikstof nu zijn eindrapport naar buiten. Taak van het adviescollege was om te beoordelen of de huidige meet- en rekensystematiek voor stikstofemissie en -depositie voldoende wetenschappelijke onderbouwing biedt voor het stikstofbeleid. In de eer...

Nutrients, water and light are the basic ingredients for crops. However, soil and water resources are under intense pressure as the world’s population increases and adopts lifestyles using environmentally intensive food products affecting air, soil and water quality. Supply of nitrogen (N) and phosphorous (P) fertilizer has large socioeconomic bene...

The effects of atmospheric nitrogen deposition (Ndep) on carbon (C) sequestration in forests have often been assessed by relating differences in productivity to spatial variations of Ndep across a large geographic domain. These correlations generally suffer from covariation of other confounding variables related to climate and other growth-limiting...

The impact of atmospheric reactive nitrogen (Nr) deposition on carbon (C) sequestration in soils and biomass of unfertilized, natural, semi-natural and forest ecosystems has been much debated. Many previous results of this dC∕dN response were based on changes in carbon stocks from periodical soil and ecosystem inventories, associated with estimates...

Het Adviescollege Meten en Berekenen Stikstof is in december 2019 begonnen aan de eerste fase van zijn opdracht om advies te geven over de wetenschappelijke kwaliteit van de Nederlandse systematiek voor het meten van en rekenen aan stikstofverbindingen ter onderbouwing van het (toekomstig) beleid van de Rijksoverheid en provincies. Het uitgangspunt...

Abstract. Ammonia emissions to the atmosphere have increased substantially in Europe since 1960, largely due to the intensification of agriculture as illustrated by enhanced livestock and increasing use of fertilizers. These associated emissions of reactive nitrogen, particulate matter and acid deposition have contributed to negative societal impac...

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...