Long-term data sets from Germany and Eastern Europe

Summary

Long-term experiments are immensely expensive. It is necessary to use all information available from them and to minimise the costs relative to the gain of scientific findings. This paper gives an overview of 50 selected long-term fertilisation experiments all of which are older than 30 years in Germany and Eastern Europe. Examples of evaluation are given. From the combined results from 13 long-term field experiments, the range of optimum mineralisable carbon contents can be estimated at 0.2 to 0.6%. The N input from the atmosphere can indirectly be derived from the N uptake from the nil plots of long-term field experiments and amounts to 50 kg ha^-1.