Effects of nitrogen losses through nitrate leaching are one of the major environmental issues worldwide. To determine the potential effect of dicyandiamide (DCD), a nitrification inhibitor, on the transformation of urea nitrogen and subsequent nitrate leaching, incubation and column leaching experiments were performed. Tokomaru silt loam soil was treated with urea, DCD, or urea plus DCD. A control was also used.
In the laboratory incubation experiment, the conversion of urea to ammonium (i.e. ammonification process or urea hydrolysis) occurred within a day, thereby increasing the soil pH from 5.8 to 6.9. DCD did not affect the ammonification process. However, DCD did slow down the subsequent oxidation of ammonium to nitrate (i.e. nitrification process). The half-life time of ammonium in this soil was increased from 9 days for the urea treatment to 31 days for the urea + DCD treatment. The production of nitrate was 5 times slower when DCD was added.
In the leaching experiments, half the columns were leached after 1 day of incubation (Day 1), the other half 7 days later (Day 7). For Day 1, no significant differences in nitrate leaching could be seen between the treatments, as the nitrification had not yet taken place. For Day 7, DCD decreased nitrate leaching by 71% with a corresponding decrease in nitrate-induced cation leaching, including ammonium. Thus, DCD seems to be effective in decreasing both ammonium and nitrate leaching, but its high solubility and thus mobility could be a limitation to its use.
The convection–dispersion equation, including source–sink terms for nitrogen transformations, ammonification, and nitrification rate constants, and a factor for nitrification inhibition by DCD, accounting for degradation and efficiency of DCD, could be used reasonably well to simulate nitrate leaching from the column leaching experiments. However, model parameter values for nitrification rate, and efficiency and decay rate for DCD, were different from those obtained from the incubation experiments, which was probably because of the difference in water content of soil between the incubation and leaching experiments.
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