A Multi-Year Comparison of No-Till Versus Conventional-Till Effects on the Carbon Balance in a Corn/Soybean Agro-Ecosystem Using Eddy Covariance

Abstract:

Dramatic increases in atmospheric CO₂ concentrations since the industrial revolution are in large part due to the release of carbon previously stored in the soil. No-till strategies have been proposed as a means to mitigate agricultural contributions to atmospheric carbon by decreasing emissions and sequestering carbon in agricultural soils while increasing water use efficiency and soil quality. However, the effects of no-till versus conventional-till practices on carbon sequestration often vary due to difficulty in quantifying soil carbon as soil properties change with management. Eddy covariance (EC) offers a more accurate method of continuously measuring the total carbon budget and does so without relying on physical soil carbon measurements. The majority of agricultural land in the Midwestern United States is farmed using the corn/soybean rotation, making it an ideal agro-ecosystem to examine the potential of adopting no-till practices on carbon and water balances. In this study, we use EC to compare carbon and water fluxes between continuous no-till and conventional-till corn/soybean sites over several years in east central Illinois. This allows the determination and comparison of 1) net ecosystem exchange (NEE) and net biome production (NEE after accounting for grain usage); 2) water use efficiency; and 3) response to climatic variation, both at short and long time scales, between the two tillage systems. We hypothesize that both carbon uptake and water use efficiency will improve with no-till practices, which in turn will improve crop responses to environmental factors such as drought and heat stress.