近几十年来，人为活性氮数量急剧增加，在满足人类生产、生活的同时，也引发了诸多环境问题，现在我们面临着协调粮食安全、生态环境安全和气候变化的巨大挑战。绝大部分活性氮首先进入到土壤，在经过各种转化过程后，进入生物、水体和大气等系统。土壤氮转化过程及其速率的组合对土壤氮去向具有“调配器”的作用，对其进行深入研究是因地制宜地制订氮素管理措施的基础。从土壤氮转化速率角度着手，综述了土壤氮转化速率的研究方法，阐述了氮初级转化速率研究对深入认识土壤氮动态的作用，明确了土壤氮转化过程影响土壤氮去向的作用机理，阐明了土壤氮转化特点、植物氮形态喜好和气候三者间的契合程度对提高作物氮利用率的重要作用。同时，指出了现有的土壤氮转化速率研究方法的不足之处，急需建立一套能够同时定量土壤—植物系统中土壤氮初级转化速率和植物氮吸收速率的方法，实现定量化分析土壤氮转化过程与植物间的反馈作用关系，以深入认识更接近于自然状态的土壤—植物系统中氮动态特征，为制订合理的氮肥管理方案提供理论依据。

In recent decades, the amount of reactive nitrogen (N) has rapidly increased. While the reactive N, mainly chemical N fertilizers, meet food and economic development demands, it has also caused many environmental problems. Now, there are the triple challenges of food security, environmental degradation and climate change for the world due to the rapid increase of reactive N. Most of reactive N has been input to soil firstly, which would export to hydrosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere after transformed as different N forms through various N transformation processes. Thus, soil N transformations play very important role in regulating the fate of soil N. In this article, we review the methods determining the rates of soil N transformations, and clarify the role of soil gross N transformations to regulating soil N dynamics and its mechanisms. Our results suggest that the coupling of soil N transformation with climate and plant species-specific N preferences play important role in optimize N use efficiencies in agricultural production. However, scientists usually just qualitatively discuss the feedbacks and its mechanisms between plants and soil N transformations, due to the limitation of research methods. The quantitative investigation on the effects of these feedbacks on soil gross N transformations is of important significances to understand the feedback and its mechanisms between plants and soil N transformations, to optimize N fertilization, and to make N pollution control countermeasures and so on.