ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Plant Nutrition
Impact of Nitrogen Fertilizer Concentrations on Growth, Yield, and Nutrient Use Efficiency of Wolfberry (Lycium barbarum L.) in Northwestern China
Provisionally accepted
- 1Ningxia University, Yinchuan, China
- 2Key Laboratory for Digital Water Governance of Yellow River Interconnection in Ningxia, Yinchuan, China
- 3Ningxia Water Conservancy Research Institute, Yinchuan, China
- 4Ningxia Engineering and Technology Research Center for Water-saving and Efficient Dry-crop Agriculture, Yinchuan, China
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
This study aimed to evaluate the effects of nitrogen (N) concentration in nutrient solution on growth, nutrient uptake, fruit yield, fruit quality, and nutrient-use efficiency of wolfberry (Lycium barbarum L.) under substrate-based soilless cultivation, and to identify an optimal N level for practical fertigation management. A controlled two-year experiment (2023-2024) was conducted in arid northwestern China using four N levels (250, 300, 350, and 400 mg L-1) applied through drip fertigation, with three replicates per treatment. Moderate N supply (350 mg L-1, T3) enhanced vegetative growth and nutrient uptake compared with the lower-N treatments. T3 achieved the highest yield (2759.65 kg ha-1 in 2023 and 2930.93 kg ha-1 in 2024) and improved 100-berry weight and several quality-related traits, including β-carotene, crude protein, and essential amino acids. In contrast, the highest N level (400 mg L-1, T4) did not further increase yield and was accompanied by lower nutrient-use efficiency; this response may be associated with nutrient imbalance and excessive vegetative growth under high N supply. NUE, PUE, and KUE were higher under low-to-moderate N inputs and declined under the high-N treatment. An entropy weight-TOPSIS evaluation further ranked T3 as the best overall treatment when multiple indicators were jointly considered. These results suggest that optimizing N concentration (around 350 mg L-1) can improve productivity while maintaining nutrient-use efficiency under the tested soilless cultivation conditions.
Keywords: Drip fertigation, Entropy weight-TOPSIS, nitrogen concentration, nutrient use efficiency, Soilless cultivation, Wolfberry
Received: 14 Jan 2026; Accepted: 16 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Yuan, Xu, Dou, Tang, Tan and Xu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ligang Xu
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.