“…Nitrogen is the key element for maize yield (Evenson and Gollin, 2003;Rubin et al, 2016;Abera et al, 2017;Ning et al, 2018). To achieve high yield in China and other countries, farmers frequently apply N fertilizers in excess of crop requirements (Richter and Roelcke, 2000;Peng et al, 2010;Chen et al, 2011;Zhang et al, 2013;Zhang et al, 2015), which reduces N use efficiency (NUE; Noor, 2017;Chen et al, 2018;Yong et al, 2018) and contributes to N losses and environmental pollution Zhao et al, 2017;Zhang et al, 2017;Chen et al, 2017). Previous studies have shown that increased plant density is among the major factors associated with increases in maize yield (Tollenaar and Lee, 2002;Tokatlidis and Koutroubas, 2004;Long et al, 2006;Meng et al, 2013) and NUE (Cheng et al, 2015;Ren et al, 2017;Wei et al, 2017).…”