Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.**, the nitrogen cycle is…

Awards issued prior to january 20, 2025, were funded under previous administrations and may not reflect the priorities and policies of the current administration.**, the nitrogen cycle is fundamentally important to soil health, crop productivity, food security, and the agro-economy. The processes that drive nitrogen transformations are influenced by soil conditions that can exhibit large variability on millimeter and hour scales. The current state of knowledge of the nitrogen cycle is limited by a lack of empirical data at spatiotemporal scales necessary to challenge biogeochemical models. Improving this understanding will better inform agricultural decision-making aimed at increasing crop productivity, reducing costs, and improving crop resilience, thereby helping USDA achieve its strategic goals 2 and 3.aerodyne research willdevelop, demonstrate, and commercialize a novel sampling and detection system that can measure key intermediates of the nitrogen cycle - nitrate, nitrite, and hydroxylamine -on MM-scales and with hourly time resolution. Current methods aimed at measuring these compounds are labor-intensive, destructive, insensitive, or lack the necessary resolution. The automated aerodyne system will connectan array of small soil water probes to a fast, sensitive gas analyzer, enabling real-time, hands-offsubsurface mapping of these chemicals. The resulting technology will provide deep new insights into the nitrogen cycle in soil and its role in crop productivity and soil health. This broad range of impacts will also give IT substantial commercial potential, accessing markets in agronomy, subsurface monitoring, and ecology.