We investigated relationships between mineral nitrogen (N) fertilisation rates and additional manure amendment with different crop types through an analysis of soil environmental characteristics and microbiomes, soil N₂O and N₂ emissions as well as biomass production. The results show that wheat grew well at a fertilisation rate of 80 kg N ha⁻¹, and newly introduced sorghum showed good potential for cultivation in temperate climates.

We conducted a service soil laboratory comparison study and tested the individual effect of common sieving, grinding, drying, and quantification methods on total, inorganic, and organic soil carbon (C) measurements. We found that inter-lab variability is large and each soil processing step impacts C measurement accuracy and/or precision. Standardizing soil processing methods is needed to ensure C measurements are accurate and precise, especially for C credit allocation and model calibration.

We incubated 10 Japanese soils to study CO₂ release under drying–rewetting cycles (DWCs). CO₂ release was increased by DWCs among all soils, showing soil-by-soil variations in CO₂ release increase magnitude. The organo-Al complex was the primary predictor for the increase magnitude, suggesting vulnerability of carbon protection by reactive minerals against DWCs. Microbial biomass decrease by DWCs was also suggested, although its link with the CO₂ release increase is still unclear.

Soil mixing (bioturbation) plays a key role in soil functions, but the underlying processes are poorly understood and difficult to quantify. In this study, we use luminescence, a light-sensitive soil mineral property, and numerical models to better understand different types of bioturbation. We provide a conceptual model that helps to determine which types of bioturbation processes occur in a soil and a numerical model that can derive quantitative process rates from luminescence measurements.

This work implemented automated electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) for belowground field phenotyping alongside conventional field breeding techniques, thereby closing the phenotyping gap. We show that ERT is not only capable of measuring differences between crops but also has sufficient precision to capture the differences between genotypes of the same crop. We automatically derive indicators, which can be translated to static and dynamic plant traits, directly useful for breeders.