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studies with the same set of environmental conditions the denitrification rate varies,
perhaps indicating that the current accepted method of measuring the denitrification rate
is not accurate enough to quantify the denitrification rate and hence the amount of
denitrification.
While the above reasons are pure speculation, the likely reason for obtaining such a result
is that denitrification is a complex biological process that is controlled by several
parameters
Tuchloke (2007) separated the dataset based on the methodology used to determine the
denitrification rate and found that the results improved considerably, while the
improvement was significant, it is, in the author’s opinion not accurate enough to
estimate the rate of denitrification.
R_d_n (kgNha^-^1d^-^1)
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0
Denitrification Rate Vs. Organic carbon (All Data n=1129)
0
Rdn (kgN ha-1 d-1) = 1.903 + 0.07439 OC (%)
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OC (%)
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S 8.58316
R-Sq 0.1%
Figure 2.1 Relationship of denitrification rate and OC based on the literature data.
By restricting the dataset to similar studies, I plotted the relationship between Rdn and OC
(Figure 2.2). These results show a more promising outlook than the previous attempt of
lumping together all the data. While the correlations are weak in many cases they are still
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