Grain yield and nitrogen cycling under conservation agriculture and biochar amendment in agroecosystems of sub-Saharan Africa. A meta-analysis
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Soil nitrogen (N) is one of the most limiting factors affecting crop production in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Here we conducted a meta-analysis on the effect of climate smart agricultural (CSA) practices (conservation agriculture (CA) and/or biochar (BC)) application on: (1) soil nitrate-N (NO 3 -N), nitrous oxide (N 2 O) emission, biological N 2 -fixation, percent of nitrogen derived from the atmosphere (%Ndfa), grain yield and nitrogen use efficiency (NUE), (2) the role of soil properties and regions on grain yield and N cycling under CA and/or BC biochar application; and (3) the relationship between inorganic N fertilizer and NO 3 -N, N 2 O emissions, NUE and grain yield. We synthesized 87 unique papers, from 15 countries in SSA with 1643 paired observations. On average across all studies, CA and/or BC significantly increased grain yield and NUE, compared to conventional practices. Residue retention resulted in a significant increase in soil NO 3 -N and N 2 O emission, compared to conventional practices. Our analysis further indicates that BC application significantly increased biological N 2 -fixation, grain yield and NUE. Auxiliary soil parameters also affected grain yield and N cycling. Grain yield was significantly influenced by total organic carbon classes (TOC), whereby highest grain yield was recorded under CSA in soils with 0.5–1 % TOC, compared to soils with < 0.5 % TOC and > 1 % TOC. In addition, total nitrogen (TN) significantly affected the response ratio of CSA and conventional agriculture on N 2 O emission and biological N 2 -fixation. N 2 O emission increased significantly in soils with < 0.05 % TN, while biological N 2 -fixation increased significantly in soils with > 0.2 % TN. Increasing N fertilizer use significantly increased the response ratio of CSA and conventional agriculture on N 2 O and NO 3 -N while significantly reducing the response ratio of yield and NUE. The gap in yield and NUE between CSA and conventional agriculture practises was more pronounced at lower N rates of 0 kg ha −1 and narrowed as N input increased to 120 kg ha −1 ; this implies that, CSA offers more benefits compared to conventional agricultural practices under low N rates. • Conservation agriculture significantly increased grain yield and NUE, compared to conventional practices. • Residue retention significantly increased soil NO 3 -N, leading to higher N 2 O emissions, compared to conventional practices. • Biochar increased biological N 2 -fixation, grain yield and NUE, compared to conventional practices. • Climate smart agriculture offers more benefits in low N rates than high N rates, compared to conventional agriculture.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it