So, I have already spent the whole 2 years of my PhD research.

First of all, I could finally published my first paper from this PhD research! It’s on the response of N₂O to N rates observed in our first field trial in 2018/19.

Takeda, N., Friedl, J., Rowlings, D., De Rosa, D., Scheer, C., Grace, P., Exponential response of nitrous oxide (N₂O) emissions to increasing nitrogen fertiliser rates in a tropical sugarcane cropping system. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, 313:107376, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2021.107376

We also have got results on ¹⁵N recoveries in response to N rates and submitted another paper, which is still under review at the moment.

Takeda, N., Friedl, J., Rowlings, D., De Rosa, D., Scheer, C., Grace, P., Increasing N rates increase fertiliser N loss, but not sugar yield - the fate of ¹⁵N fertiliser in an intensive sugarcane system. Nutrient Cycling in Agroecosystems, (Under Review).

On the other hand, some conferences were cancelled or postponed and thus I have never done yet. The first one will be the oral presentation at Soil Science Australia and the New Zealand Society of Soil Science Joint Conference in June 2021. There is another oral presentation expected in Oct 2021 for 20th Australian Agronomy Conference.

Overall, I can say I’m still on track towards the end of my PhD research but there are a lot more to do! I had a discussion with my supervisory team on plans towards the thesis, which I would like to summarise in another article sometime soon.

Also, I have started working as a research assisstant in a GRDC project, mainly focusing on the use of APSIM. It’s been a while to work on grain cropping sysrtems since my MSc and the learning curve is pretty steep…but it definitely expands my expertise in cropping system modelling!

Well, it’s a very brief catch up with my research progresses… I should and will update my progress more frequently for sure!