SBIR-STTR Award

Understanding and controlling the transformations of nitrogen in soil is a fundamental tool of modern agriculture. The nitrogen cycle is an important set of microbial processes that can increase plant-available nutrients but can also lead to losses in the form of greenhouse gas emissions and leaching. Identifying and using these processes to sustainably improve soil health increase crop yield and minimize ecological impact requires a foundational understanding of their mechanisms and drivers. However the inherent spatial heterogeneity and temporal variability of the soil environment challenges current experimental tools that are aimed at exploring subsurface nitrogen cycling. New approaches are needed that can interrogate nitrogen pathways in situ and with high spatial and temporal fidelity. The goal of this project is to develop and commercialize a measurement platform capable of identifying and mapping subsurface nitrogen cycling processes in real time. The overall system will add new knowledge and complement existing tools that provide a wealth of information on sparse spatiotemporal scales. The proposed project will address the USDA research priority to develop new technologies for measuring "soil nutrientcontent" and "microbial functional activity related to nutrient cycling" (Topic 8.4 Priority 2) and to "monitor air quality and reduce air pollution stemming from agricultural enterprises" (Topic8.4 Priority 3).The proposed technology will combine recently developed diffusive soil gas probes with anew spectroscopic platform capable of detecting hydroxylamine and the isotopomers of nitrousoxide both of which are messengers of subsurface nitrogen pathways. This novel measurement capability will allow identification of specific nitrogen cycling processes. During Phase I the spectroscopic analyzer will be developed and built; the sampling approach will be investigated and optimized to minimize artifacts and losses; the combined system will be tested in the laboratory using a biotic and real-world soils; and a prototype will be designed for construction in Phase II. The proposed research and development will yield a detection system that enables real- time in situ mapping of subsurface nitrogen pathways by measuring hydroxylamine and other trace gases. It will be marketed to the soil science research community which is in need of new tools to improve the understanding of nutrient cycling in real-world soils. This market is already large and growing due to the continual need for more agricultural productivity food security and the increasing importance of biofuel production.

The nitrogen cycle is fundamentally important to ecosystem health crop productivity food security biosphere-atmosphere exchange air quality and climate change. The processes that drive nitrogen transformations in soil are influenced by environmental conditions that can exhibit large variability leading to spatial and temporal heterogeneity of nitrogen cycling on millimeter and hour scales. These fluctuations impact nutrient availability for roots and the nearby microbiome that affect ecosystem health and plant productivity. These same variations can lead to hot spots and moments of intense gas production impacting air quality and climate change. The current state of knowledge of the nitrogen cycle is limited by a lack of empirical data at spatiotemporal scales necessary to challenge biogeochemical models. Improving this understanding will better inform ecological and agricultural decision-making aimed at preserving natural resources battling climate change and increasing crop productivity thereby helping USDA achieve its Strategic Goals 1 and 2. Aerodyne Research proposes to develop demonstrate and commercialize a novel sampling and detection system that can quantify subsurface concentrations or fluxes of key intermediates of the nitrogen cycle - nitrate nitrite and hydroxylamine - on mm-scales and with hourly time resolution. Current methods aimed at measuring these compounds are labor-