A comparison of disaggregated nitrogen budgets for Danish agriculture using Europe-wide and national approaches

Spatially detailed information on nitrogen (N) budgets is relevant for the identification of regions N pollution needs to be reduced. However, the availability of consistent reliable data is generally lacking. Therefore most models applied in Europe use national or even European scale data as model input. To gain insight in the reduction in uncertainty that could be achieved by using higher resolution input data, spatially disaggregated agricultural N budgets for Denmark for the period 2000-2010 were generated by the European scale model Integrator, being fed with high spatial resolution national data for Denmark (Integrator-DK) and compared with results obtained by using the default data (Integrator-EU). Here we focus on the year 2010, for which the quality of the regional Danish input data was considered best. Results show that clear differences exists for the national budgets calculated by both versions of the model but comparison with an independently derived Danish national budget appeared to be better with Integrator-EU results. However, the spatial distribution of manure distribution and N losses from Integrator-DK are closer to the observed distributions than those from Integrator-EU