Quoted from: Gilhespy, Sarah L., Steven Anthony, Laura Cardenas, David Chadwick, Agustin del Prado, Changsheng Li, Thomas Misselbrook et al. "First 20 years of DNDC (DeNitrification DeComposition): model evolution." Ecological modelling 292 (2014): 51-62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2014.09.004 

DNDC was modified for application into the UK to produce UK-DNDC (Brown et al., 2002). The original UK-DNDC model contained four sub models based on Li et al. (1992) and Li (2000). UK-specific input data were added to DNDC’s database to include soil characteristics, crop types, climate, livestock, and farming practices. During 2006–2011 a windows version of UK-DNDC was developed and a spatially differentiated manure application database was created and linked to UK-DNDC; this made UK-DNDC unique for modelling the pasture-dominated agro-ecosystems in the UK.

Whilst the above improvements were made to UK-DNDC, in the meantime, much progress was made in DNDC regarding crop growth, soil climate and soil C and N dynamics, which substantially enhanced the model’s capacity. This resulted in differences between UK-DNDC and DNDC regarding their performances. Thus, a ‘new’ UK-DNDC model was created to combine the advantages of the original UK-DNDC with the current version of DNDC at that time (DNDC version 9.4, September 2011). The new version of UK-DNDC adopted most of the latest developments in DNDC detailed in Li (2000) and Li et al. (2000) including improved simulations of (1) crop growth, (2) farming management practices, (3) soil climate, (4) NH3 volatilisation from soil, fertilizer and manure applications, (5) NO3− leaching loss, (6) gaseous N emissions from nitrification and denitrification, and (7) CH4 emissions from fermentation. At the regional scale, the new UK-DNDC utilised its own databases including the spatially differentiated (regional) livestock numbers and their daily manure production. Information on the databases and structure of UK-DNDC is detailed in Cardenas et al. (2013). The UK-DNDC model has recently been modified by further parameterization of the grazing systems to better simulate the effect of grazing on N2O production (Wang et al., 2012).