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Publications

NIBIOs employees contribute to several hundred scientific articles and research reports every year. You can browse or search in our collection which contains references and links to these publications as well as other research and dissemination activities. The collection is continously updated with new and historical material.

2019

Abstract

As the main drivers of climate change, greenhouse gas (e.g., CO2 and CH4) emissions have been monitored intensively across the globe. The static chamber is one of the most commonly used approaches for measuring greenhouse gas fluxes from ecosystems (e.g., stem/soil respiration, CH4 emission, etc.) because of its easy implementation, high accuracy and low cost (Pumpanen et al., 2004). To perform the measurements, a gas analyzer is usually used to measure the changes of greenhouse gas concentrations within a closed chamber that covers an area of interest (e.g., soil surface) over a certain period of time (usually several minutes). The flux rates (F) are then calculated from the recorded gas concentrations assuming that the changing rate is linear: F = vol/(R · T a · area) · dG/dt where vol is the volume of the chamber (l), R is the universal gas constant (l atm K-1 mol-1), Ta is the ambient temperature (K), area is the area of the chamber base (m2 ), and dG/dt is the rate of the measured gas concentration change over time t (ppm s-1) (i.e., the slope of the linear regression).

Abstract

At the Norwegian Institute of Bioeconomy Research (NIBIO, formerly Bioforsk), biochar has been a topic of research since 2009 through both laboratory and field studies. Initial results demonstrated that biochar produced from clean biomass is safe to use on agricultural soils, and that pyrolysis temperatures of ≥370 °C are necessary for producing biochar that is resistant to decomposition on a timescale of 100 years. Further work identified the chemical transformations that are responsible for biochar stability and contributed to finding the best indicator of this stability. Throughout the years, we have had close collaboration with industry and farmers in Norway, where now industrial networks are in action and there is financial support for the implementation of biochar technology. Despite the convincing benefits of biochar as a climate mitigation solution, it has only slowly advanced beyond the research stage, notably because its effect on yield are too modest. There is therefore a need for win-win biochar solutions benefiting both food production and climate mitigation. Such a solution is the development of biochar fertilizers, which capitalizes on the capacity of biochar to capture and release nutrients. As biochar properties largely depend on pyrolysis conditions and feedstock properties, our current work contributes to the selective design of biochars for the purpose of improving nutrient use efficiency.