Abstract. The effects of tillage on soil properties, crop productivity, and
global greenhouse gas emissions have been discussed in the last decades.
Global ecosystem models have limited capacity to simulate the various
effects of tillage. With respect to the decomposition of soil organic
matter, they either assume a constant increase due to tillage or they
ignore the effects of tillage. Hence, they do not allow for analysing the
effects of tillage and cannot evaluate, for example, reduced tillage or
no tillage (referred to here as “no-till”) practises as mitigation practices for climate change. In this paper, we
describe the implementation of tillage-related practices in the global
ecosystem model LPJmL. The extended model is evaluated against reported
differences between tillage and no-till management on several soil
properties. To this end, simulation results are compared with published
meta-analyses on tillage effects. In general, the model is able to reproduce
observed tillage effects on global, as well as regional, patterns of carbon
and water fluxes. However, modelled N fluxes deviate from the literature values and
need further study. The addition of the tillage module to LPJmL5 opens
up opportunities to assess the impact of agricultural soil management practices
under different scenarios with implications for agricultural productivity,
carbon sequestration, greenhouse gas emissions, and other environmental
indicators.