Impacts of land use change on nutrient balance and greenhouse gas emissions: a regional perspective

Abstract Nutrient balance is critical for sustainable land management, yet information scarcity hampers its systematic evaluation of trade-offs among alternate land uses. We employed a detailed regional nutrient dataset collected from 70 monitoring sites over 16 years to conduct a comprehensive analysis of yields, nutrient balances and greenhouse gas emissions associated with different land management practices in Lower Saxony, Germany. The information was used to develop land use transformation scenarios while assessing their impacts on regional nutrient balances and emissions. Our analysis demonstrated that organic farming exhibited lower nutrient surpluses but also lower yields compared to conventional systems, while grazing systems showed the highest nutrient outputs. A comparison with other regional studies highlights the importance of unique combinations of climate, soil, management practices, and socioeconomic settings in developing sustainable land management strategies – a global perspective, while useful in setting goals, may not capture local needs specific to this combination of factors.