Exploring low-carbon mulching strategies for maize and wheat on-farm: Spatial responses, factors and mitigation potential

Abstract

Mulching strategies - including plastic film mulching (FM) and straw mulching (SM) - can enhance crop yields while affecting multiple greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes. However, most of currently published site-based studies only focus on a certain gas, resulting in an inability to spatially integrated understanding of changes in agricultural global warming potential (GWP) and greenhouse gas intensity (GHGI) caused by mulching across China. Thus, we developed an optimal model considering crop type, meteorology, soil and management variables by four machine learning methods, namely support vector machine, multilayer perceptron, random forest, and gradient boosting machine (GBM). Then we mapped the relative changes in yield and GHG fluxes caused by mulching strategies. The GBM model had the best simulation capability for yield and GHGs in China. Our result showed that FM increased yield in maize (25 %) and wheat (19 %), while SM respectively increased by 14 % and 11 %. Among the relative changes due to mulching strategies, yield and N₂O emissions were mainly influenced by soil fertility and soil properties, CH₄ uptakes and CO₂ emissions were more affected by environmental factors. GWP in maize and wheat average increased by 40 % under FM, while SM decreased GWP by 14 % and 2 %, respectively. Besides, FM average increased GHGI in maize and wheat by 17 % and 9 %, and SM decreased GHGI by 22 % and 12 %, respectively. Spatially, FM reduced maize GWP on 19 % of cropland, while SM reduced maize and wheat GWP on 71 % and 64 % of cropland, respectively. Soil pH was significantly correlated with ΔGHGI in maize and wheat. Our analysis not only estimated for the first time the spatial effects of mulching strategies across China, but also systematically analyzes the agricultural carbon emission mitigation potential of mulching strategies, which promote the development of low-carbon agriculture based on locally appropriate mulching strategies.

Keywords: Global warming potential; Gradient boosting machine; Greenhouse gas emissions intensity; Low-carbon agriculture; Mulching strategies; Soil respiration.