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Climate and animal agriculture are interrelated processes and related foods may be threatened through changes in temperature, rainfall and extreme weather events. The present study was aimed to investigate the climate trend over the production area of Grana Padano (GP) cheese. The area is in North of Italy, covers a total land of 46,000km2 and it is highly suited for agricultural and livestock productions. Past (1971–2000), recent (2001–2010) and future (2020–2050) climate scenarios were considered and compared. The analysis showed positive anomalies both for minimum and maximum temperatures and a decrease of precipitation for recent and future climate. The Gaussen-Bagnouls classification pointed out a change from humid to semi-humid climate during summer months. These data suggest a warming trend and increasing risk of summer aridity over the production area of GP cheese. The analysis of temperature-humidity index (THI), from past throughout the future scenario, highlighted an increased risk of heat stress for dairy cows. The worst THI condition was predicted for July of the future scenario when milk loss may reach a level of 7 kg/cow/day. The changes in climate may threat the potential to produce GP cheese, indirectly by the negative effect of precipitation deficit on crops yield for cows feeding, directly by the increase of heat stress-related milk loss. These findings may be of help to animate the debate on climate change-related impacts on regional food systems and support policymakers in developing adaptation strategies for the production system of GP cheese.

The landscape is widely identified as a relevant target both by integrative policies and across the disciplines dealing with resource management and territorial planning. Landscape agronomy promotes a greater involvement of agricultural sciences into this arena by increasing the attention on the dynamics relating the farming practices to the natural resources and the temporal and spatial patterns of land covers. This book covers the background that improved the transdisciplinary interface of agronomy with spatially-explicit disciplines like landscape ecology and geography both in research and in training programs, in addition to some experiences of participative landscape management. On these bases, the state of art on cutting-edge data availability and methodological issues is used to select and discuss some worldwide case studies. This selection of research topic examples underpins the concluding discussions about challenges ahead. Researchers as well as policy and decision makers are the main target of this book that seeks to provide a toolbox of concepts, examples and ideas to improve the understanding of agricultural landscapes. Agricultural activities manage the greatest share of land surface on Earth with fast-paced changes compared to any other human land use. With this book we aim at providing a stronger interface between agricultural science and landscape design processes., More information about the book https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-05263-7

Statistical Climatology investigates the application of statistics to atmospheric and climate science. This Thesis is intended to contribute some developments in this field. The Thesis is composed of two distinct applied problems: the first presents a functional clustering procedure applied to meteorological time series to obtain homogeneous climate zones; the second builds a hierarchical Bayesian model aiming at the prediction of 15- and 30-minutes cumulated precipitation at unknown locations and time using information on lightnings in the same area.