Resumen de Exploring the possibilities of parsimonious nitrogen modelling in different ecosystems
Nitrogen is a fundamental component of living organisms, but it is also in short supply in forms in which vegetation can assimilate. As a result, nitrogen is a limiting element for vegetation growth. However, as a consequence of the human-mediated introduction of mineral nitrogen, nitrogen is also a major pollutant in anthropogenic ecosystems. Both natural and anthropogenic ecosystems supply important goods and services for the human wellbeing and in order to maintain the human living standards, there is a necessity of preserving natural ecosystems over time on one side, while improving the sustainability of anthropogenic ecosystems on the other. In that sense, mathematical models including the nitrogen cycle are useful tools which allow the analysis of the relationships and behaviours of these ecosystems, and there is a clear need to continue to develop and test nitrogen models, principally, models with an integrated approach, capable to deal with the different characteristics and behaviours of natural and anthropogenic ecosystems.
Hence, the aim of the present thesis is to improve the nitrogen cycle modelling, exploring different parsimonious modelling approaches within the plant-soil-water continuum in natural and anthropogenic semiarid ecosystems. To face this objective, two parsimonious nitrogen models have been developed and implemented in two different data availability scenarios.
Firstly, a new parsimonious carbon and nitrogen model, TETIS-CN, is implemented in a semiarid natural forest ecosystem trying to contribute to a better understanding and modelling of the hydrological and biogeochemical (carbon and nitrogen) cycles and their interactions in semiarid conditions and to test its capability to satisfactorily reproduce them. The results are satisfactory and suggest that it is important to include carbon observations in the calibration process, to consider all the existing vegetation species in the simulation, and that a fixed daily potential uptake may not be appropriate to reproduce the plant nitrogen uptake process. Secondly, a new parsimonious nitrogen model, TETIS-N, is implemented in a semiarid anthropogenic agricultural ecosystem. Since agriculture is the major source of diffuse pollution, being nitrogen and sediment pollution of water bodies its main associated environmental impacts, this second approach aims to improve its sustainability by evaluating the impact of several management practices on nitrogen and sediment loads, and horticultural crop yields. As a result, each management practice resulted effective in reducing a certain type of diffuse pollution, and therefore, combined scenarios are necessary to cope with all agricultural pollution sources.
This thesis proved that each ecosystem has different characteristics and behaviours and therefore, different modelling necessities. Consequently, current models should include an integrate modelling of both natural and anthropogenic ecosystems.
