dc.description.abstract | Agriculture, especially livestock keeping contributes significantly to changes in atmospheric
concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Research quantifying exchange of GHGs between
the biosphere and atmosphere are important in developing climate change mitigation plans.
However, with limited research methods support to scientists, many research projects have faced
major challenges in full implementation and this forms the basis of the research methods course
which intends to bridge such a gap. The experiment described herein was undertaken through
Mitigation of Climate Change in Agriculture project that facilitates developing countries to
contribute to climate change mitigation in agriculture and move smallholder systems towards
climate smart agriculture. Cattle urine and dung patches are GHG sources in pasturelands which
impacts to the global GHG budget, but specific information about these emissions are still
missing for Kenya GHG inventory. Therefore this study conducted a RCBD experiment over a
wet month to monitor GHG fluxes from cattle manure treated soils, and further used Monte
Carlo simulation of uncertainty analysis that showed cattle urine impact N20 emission at 68%.
The results showed highest N20 emission (85.72 ug m-2
h-1
) on plot with dung-urine combined
treatment. CH4 highest emission was 0.97 (mg m-2
h-1
) from plot with dung and CO2 highest
emission (320.00 mg m-2
h-1
) from dung-urine plot. Multivariate regression analysis showed that
urine, dung-urine and dung treatments were statistically significant in explaining the effect of
N20, CH4 and CO2 respectively at (P :s 0.05). This study was successfully accomplished through
use of efficient data management and organization plan. Therefore, concluding that all research
projects require a data management plan that is well designed by a research methods support,
before conducting any research. | en_US |