Journal article

Ammonia deposition in the neighbourhood of an intensive cattle feedlot in Victoria, Australia

J Shen, D Chen, M Bai, J Sun, T Coates, SK Lam, Y Li

Scientific Reports | NATURE PORTFOLIO | Published : 2016

Abstract

Intensive cattle feedlots are large emission sources of ammonia (NH 3), but NH 3 deposition to the landscape downwind of feedlots is not well understood. We conducted the first study in Australia to measure NH 3 dry deposition within 1 km of a commercial beef cattle feedlot in Victoria. NH 3 concentrations and deposition fluxes decreased exponentially with distance away from the feedlot. The mean NH 3 concentrations decreased from 419 μg N m 3 at 50 m to 36 μg N m 3 at 1 km, while the mean NH 3 dry deposition fluxes decreased from 2.38 μg N m 2 s 1 at 50 m to 0.20 μg N m 2 s 1 at 1 km downwind from the feedlot. These results extrapolate to NH 3 deposition of 53.9 tonne N yr 1 in the area wit..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by National Natural Science Foundation of China


Funding Acknowledgements

This research was financially supported by the Meat & Livestock Australia, China Scholarship Council and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41371303). We acknowledge the valuable advice from Dr. Tom Denmead, Dr. Sean McGinn and Dr. Thomas Flesch on experimental design and Dr. Guoping Liu for his field assistance during the experiment. We also thank Dr. Arvin Mosier for his English polishing for the manuscript.