Soil GHG Fluxes.xlsx

In Sub-Saharan Africa, agricultural production has been on the declined mainly due to low soil fertility exacerbated by climate variability as a result of rise in global atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Several soil fertility amendments have been developed, experimented, adopted and found to improve both yields and general soil health. However, very few studies has been conducted to quantify the contribution of each the soil fertility amendment towards national GHG budget. This creates a huge data gap which may result to uncertainties in the national GHG inventories and may result to poor targeting of mitigation and adaptation measures thus the need to fill it. Also, Kenya as a developing country has been reporting to the UNFCCC on its current status of GHG emissions using default IPCC Tier I emission factors which tend to over-estimate the national greenhouse status in developing world. It is on these premises that we established this empirical study which was laid down in a randomized complete block design with four treatments replicated thrice. The aim of the study was to determine the soil amendment technology that produces the highest maize yields while simultaneous producing the lowest GHG emissions from a maize field in the arid and semiarid zones of central highlands of Kenya. The three fertiliser treatments investigated were i) animal manure, ii) Inorganic fertiliser, iii) a combination of animal manure and inorganic fertilisers applied at 120 kg N ha^-1yr^-1and iv) a control (No fertiliser application). The GHG data was collected for a whole year (Feb 2017 –Feb 2018) using static GHG chambers and gas chromatography. Also collected alongside, were the auxiliary data including rainfall, soil water content, soil temperature, LAI, inorganic nitrogen and other soil properties.