Assessing opportunities for the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions from irrigated broadacre cropping systems. Griffith, New South Wales, 2012-2013

The project will quantify year-round greenhouse gas (GHG)
emissions, water and nutrient fluxes in irrigated, broad-acre
cropping systems of the Southern Murray Darling Basin (SMDB).
Current and emerging irrigation and fertiliser management
practices with and without chemical inhibitors to mitigate GHG
emissions from irrigated cereal rotations will be compared.
Fluxes will be monitored using automated chambers over crops in
weighing lysimeters. The equipment enables replicated
manipulation of water and nutrients in undisturbed soil columns
beyond what is possible in the field. It also allows direct
measurement of nitrous oxide (N2O) surface emissions, N2O fate
and sources throughout the soil profile and indirect N2O
emissions in leachates. The project will develop a suite of
coincident water-nitrogen-GHG-crop, empirically measured
datasets. The datasets will be made available for model
framework development for predicting GHG emissions in grain
cultivation and for mitigation strategy development.