Overview of the role of nitrogen for food and fibre production and the implications of this for GHG emissions
Tuesday 20 June

Chair: John Williams, ADAS, UK
The role of N and estimation of NUE in Australia
Speaker: Dr Cameron Gourley, International N Initiative, Australia
The sources and drivers of N fertiliser related GHG emission losses
Speaker: Prof Peter Grace, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
The role of N and estimation of NUE in Europe
Speakers: Dr Luis Lassaleta and Alberto Sanz Cobeña, Research Centre for the Management of Agricultural and Environmental Risks (CEIGRAM), Polytechnic University of Madrid, Spain
Following the presentations there will be a panel discussion, for which the speakers will be joined by Prof Wim de Vries, Wageningen University and Research, Netherlands.

Dr Cameron Gourlay
Dr Cameron Gourley has a passion for improving nutrient management standards and nutrient use efficiency, with expertise in farm nutrient flows, fertiliser use and soil test development and interpretation.
Cameron worked for 38 years in pasture and animal production research with Agriculture Victoria and currently manages Soil Water and Nutrients Consulting. He has national and international roles with The University of Queensland, the Australian fertilizer industry Fertcare® program, and as Regional Director for Oceania for the International Nitrogen Initiative.

Prof Peter Grace
Peter Grace is Professor of Global Change at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He has over 30 years international experience in soil nitrogen cycling for sustainable agricultural production and greenhouse gas emissions. He was previously Senior Soil Scientist at CIMMYT, led the National Agricultural Nitrous Oxide Research Program (NANORP) in Australia and is involved in the Global Research Alliance for Agricultural Greenhouse Gases. He also holds an adjunct professorship at Michigan State University..

Luis Lassaleta
Luis has a PhD in biological sciences by Universidad Complutense de Madrid, focussed in the study of the sustainability of agricultural systems and their relationship with the nutrient biogeochemical cycles and greenhouse gas emissions. After his PhD he worked as coordinator of the Ecocampus Office at Universidad de Alcalá. After that he moved to France and the Netherlands where he worked at Sorbonne Université, CNRS and the Netherlands Environmental Agency (PBL) for almost 8 years. In 2018 he joined AgSystems, the research group led by Prof. Miguel Quemada, at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid as Ramón y Cajal fellow.
He is still working at the global scale and today also studies the particularities of the Mediterranean agroecosystems with respect nutrient management, pollution and climate change by means of modelling and budgeting approaches. He is an expert of the European Nitrogen Experts Panel (EUNEP) and the European Commission Knowledge Hub on water and agriculture. He leads the task on nitrogen use efficiency of the global project of United Nations Towards INMS.

Prof Alberto Sanz Cobeña
Alberto’s research activity, in addition to being focused on the study and analysis of mitigation strategies for N losses associated with agricultural production under real field conditions, is focused on an exercise of increasing scales, both temporal and spatial. The use of process models, together with the experimental data obtained during my research activity, is allowing estimates of agro-environmental impacts, in the medium and long term, in various agricultural systems and under different management strategies.
In addition, he has sought a more integrated vision of a complex problem such as GHG emissions in the agri-food system and other nitrogenous compounds and their mitigation. He is especially interested in the impact that changes in habits, both in production and consumption, can produce on the increase in the sustainability of agri-food systems, at different scales.
Since 2009 Alberto has participated in 20 competitive research projects at national and international level. In recent years he has been the Principal Investigator of three competitive projects with the aim of studying and proposing management strategies for agroecosystems that lead to lower agro-environmental impacts.

Prof Dr Ir Wim de Vries
Wim de Vries is a research scientist at Wageningen University and Research in the Netherlands in the field of soil chemistry with special reference to soil acidification, nutrient cycling, greenhouse gas emissions and heavy metal pollution. He is professor at the Environmental Systems Analysis Group of Wageningen University where he holds the chair “Integrated nutrient impact modelling”. His research is currently organized around impacts of the elevated use of nutrients (especially nitrogen and phosphorus) in agriculture on soil and water quality, greenhouse gas emissions, productivity and plant species diversity of terrestrial ecosystems and related input boundaries/critical loads.