Development of effective precision nitrogen (N) management strategies is crucially important for food security and sustainable development. Lodging is one of the major constraints to increasing maize yield that can be induced by strong winds, and is also influenced by management practices, like N rate. When making in-season N application decisions, lodging risk should be considered to avoid yield loss. Little has been reported on in-season N management strategies that also incorporate lodging risks in the decision making. The objective of this research was to develop an in-season N management strategy for maize based on the prediction of N nutrition index (NNI) at V8 stage and lodging risk at R3 stage using a lodging model. Field experiments were conducted in Northeast China from 2017 to 2019 involving different soil types, plant densities, and N rates. The preliminary results indicated that the optimum N rate giving the maximum relative yield under different plant densities varied from 176 to 203 kg ha^-1, while N rate below 192 to 262 kg ha^-1 would not induce significant lodging risks in the study site-years. A medium plant density (7.0 plants m^-2) matched with around 195 kg ha^-1 N would produce both high marginal returns and low lodging risk for the study region. More analyses are being performed to understand the relations between maize grain yield and lodging risk and in-season prediction of NNI and lodging risks using proximal sensing data, which will be presented at the conference.