Quantifying crop nitrogen status for comparisons of agronomic practices and genotypes

The nitrogen economy of the crop is a critical driver of biomass and grain production, and its importance is reflected in a large, worldwide research effort to link nitrogen, growth and yield. Particular research questions require measurement of specific traits, hence the need to quantify multiple, often complementary traits including crop nitrogen uptake, nitrogen use efficiency and its components, nitrogen concentration in the crop and its parts, down to relevant enzymes (e.g. nitrate reductase) and other products of gene expression. Nitrogen uptake, however, is co-regulated by both soil nitrogen availability and crop biomass accumulation; hence, crop nitrogen uptake or shoot nitrogen concentration reflect univocally crop nitrogen status only if comparisons are made at similar biomass. Although the allometric relationships between biomass and nitrogen uptake have been established for over two decades, many studies still report results in terms of nominal treatments, e.g. high vs low nitrogen, which are uninformative; curves relating yield and fertiliser rate, which are of local interest but provide little insight on the underlying processes and have low generic value; and nitrogen-related traits that are incomplete or inadequate to quantify crop nutrition status. Often, the allometric relationships between nitrogen and biomass are overlooked. In this opinion paper, we summarise the already well established concepts of dilution curves and nitrogen nutrition index, outline the standard partitioning of nitrogen use efficiency, and highlight the confounded effects in nitrogen use efficiency when the allometric relationship between nitrogen uptake and biomass is ignored. A sample of recent papers is used to survey the most common approaches to characterise nitrogen related traits. We illustrate the application of dilution curves and nitrogen nutrition index in the assessment and interpretation of crop responses to agronomic practices and comparisons of wheat cultivars and maize hybrids. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.