Abstract
Increasing water use efficiency and reducing nitrogen pollutant discharge are important tasks for modern agriculture. To evaluate the effect of alternate partial root-zone irrigation (APRI) on tomato plant growth, water use efficiency and nitrate-15N uptake, an experiment was conducted from June to December in 2014 under greenhouse condition in northern China. The experiment contained two irrigation patterns [APRI and conventional irrigation (CI)], two 15N labeled depths in soil (10 and 50 cm) and two transplant time (early and late summer). Results showed that, compared to CI, APRI did not significantly (p > 0.05) impact the growth and biomass accumulation in aboveground part of tomato, while it enhanced the root, reflecting by greater length density, and more dry mass. APRI produced marginally lower yields, but saved 34.9% of irrigation water, and gave a 37.6–49.9% higher water use efficiency relative to CI. In addition, APRI improved fruit quality, mainly through increasing the contents of soluble solid (by 12.8–21.6%), and vitamin C (2.8–12.7%), and the sugar/acid ratio (3.5–8.5%). The 15N utilization efficiency (15NUE) in APRI was higher than that in CI, which was more evident when 15N was labeled at 50 cm depth. Significant (p < 0.05) 15N recovery increase of 10.2–13.2% and 15N loss decrease of 35.4–54.6% were found for APRI compared to CI. The overall results suggest that APRI under greenhouse could benefit the nitrate-N recovery and increase the water use efficiency in tomato.
Highlights
Greenhouse agriculture achieves great success in many countries like Netherlands (Korthals Altes and van Rij, 2013), Israel (Teitel and Zhao, 1992; Elad et al, 2014), Japan (Kinoshita et al, 2016), and the United States (Burnett et al, 2016)
Topak et al (2016) study in semi-arid area demonstrated that, alternate partial root-zone irrigation (APRI) with 50% full irrigation water increased the root water use efficiency (WUE) of sugar beet by 19.8% compared to full irrigation, and by 8.5% compared to conventional deficit irrigation with a same amount of applied water
APRI produced marginally lower yields, while saved 34.9% of the total irrigation water, and gave a 37.6–49.9% higher WUE relative to conventional irrigation (CI)
Summary
Greenhouse agriculture achieves great success in many countries like Netherlands (Korthals Altes and van Rij, 2013), Israel (Teitel and Zhao, 1992; Elad et al, 2014), Japan (Kinoshita et al, 2016), and the United States (Burnett et al, 2016). A survey has shown that in China, average inorganic N input for one season vegetable under greenhouse is 569–2,000 kg/ha, which is several times or even dozen times over that applied to field crop, quantities of the applied fertilizer nitrogen are residual in the soil (Dorais et al., 2005). We hypothesized that the lower water supply in APRI may keep nitrate-N in shallower soil layer, may increase the plant N uptake compared to conventional irrigation. We conducted an experiment in northeastern China that using 15N tracing technique as research method, to investigate: (1) the effect of APRI on the tomato growth, biomass accumulation, quality, yield and WUE at different transplant time, and (2) the effect of APRI on the recovery and loss of soil NO−3 -N. The results are expected to provide useful information for the application of APRI under greenhouse condition, and for the reutilization of soil residual fertilizer nitrogen
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