Abstract
To meet the growing food demand while addressing the multiple challenges of exacerbating phosphorus (P) pollution and depleting P rock reserves1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15, P use efficiency (PUE, the ratio of productive P output to P input in a defined system) in crop production needs to be improved. Although many efforts have been devoted to improving nutrient management practices on farms, few studies have examined the historical trajectories of PUE and their socioeconomic and agronomic drivers on a national scale1,2,6,7,11,16,17. Here we present a database of the P budget (the input and output of the crop production system) and PUE by country and by crop type for 1961–2019, and examine the substantial contribution of several drivers for PUE, such as economic development stages and crop portfolios. To address the P management challenges, we found that global PUE in crop production must increase to 68–81%, and recent trends indicate some meaningful progress towards this goal. However, P management challenges and opportunities in croplands vary widely among countries.
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Data availability
All data are available in the article and its Supplementary information. Other raw data supporting the findings of this study are available at https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.573n5tb74. Source data are provided with this paper.
Code availability
The code used to perform analyses in this study was generated in MATLAB R2020b. Figures were created in Microsoft PowerPoint software, R 4.2.0, MATLAB R2020b, Adobe Acrobat Pro 2022.001.20169 and ArcGIS 10.8.1 (https://www.esri.com/). Maps in Supplementary Information were generated in Tableau 2020.2 using free map data from OpenStreetMap (https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright). The MATLAB code needed to generate the results presented in the paper is available at https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.573n5tb74. Additional code is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the OCP Research LLC for providing financial support and suggestions; F. Knorre for providing the code for the cointegration test, the non-cointegration test and the extended fully modified ordinary least squares estimator adapted for the cointegrating polynomial regression; D. Liang and V. Lyubchich for providing suggestions on statistical analyses; A. J. Elmore and K. Jackson for providing suggestions on map copyright; and K. Jackson for generating the main-text maps in ArcGIS. X.Z. is supported by the National Science Foundation (CNS-1739823, CBET-2047165, and CBET-2025826) and the Belmont Forum.
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X.Z. and T.Z. conceptualized the study. T.Z. coded the numerical analyses and analysed the data based on X.Z.’s previous work and suggestions from X.Z. and E.A.D. T.Z. wrote the paper. T.Z., X.Z. and E.A.D. edited the paper.
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Supplementary Information
This file contains Supplementary Notes 1–7, Figs. 1–14, Tables 1–32 and References.
Supplementary Data 1
Phosphorus contents and ranges (minima and maxima in the literature) used in this study.
Supplementary Data 2
Phosphorus content ranges (minima and maxima), means and standard deviations used in the sensitivity test.
Supplementary Data 3
Phosphorus use efficiency (PUE) data used for scenario analysis (global 50th and 75th percentiles).
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Zou, T., Zhang, X. & Davidson, E.A. Global trends of cropland phosphorus use and sustainability challenges. Nature 611, 81–87 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05220-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05220-z
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