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Adequate planning of soil and water conservation requires understanding and prediction of the interactions between soil, climate and management scenarios. These interactions have been investigated over the last decades by means of modelling tools. Some of the most widely used models, namely KINEROS, WEPP, SWAT, and AnnAGNPS have been compared in terms of interfaces, processes, data and parameter requirements, to describe their application domain. Some applicative cases are also added to evidence the importance of rainfall regimes, processes scale, land typologies and management for soil and water conservation modelling, to support the needs of farmers, researchers, extension services and land planners. In general there is evidence of a too large amount of parameters to satisfy common users' perception of reliability on simulation results, while they are all good teaching and research tools.

50 year-long time series from a Long Term Agronomic Experiment have been used to to investigate the effects of climate change on yields of Wheat and Maize. Trends and fluctuations, useful to estimate production forecasts and related risks are compared to national ones, a classical regional climatic index as Western Mediterranean Oscillation Index, and a global one given by Sun Spot Number. Data, denoised by EMD and SSA, show how SSN oscillations slowing down in the last decades, affects regional scale dynamics, where in the last two decades a range of fluctuations (7-16 years) are also evident. Both signals reflects on yield fluctuations of Wheat and Maize both a national and local level., Comment: 10 pages + 7 composite figures + 2 appendices

L'introduzione alla Fisica Ambientale è scritta per studenti dei primi anni di università, scritto allo scopo di dare una linea di studio dei concetti chiave e cercando di stimolare approfondimenti. Si affrontano a livello elementare i concetti di base della fisica dell'atmosfera, meteorologia e climatologia, idrologia e fisica del suolo, privilegiando la descrizione dei processi che caratterizzano gli ambienti terrestri. Il testo inizia col descrivere gli aspetti strutturali dell'ambiente, diviso nei suoi elementi classici sole, aria, acqua e terra; nella seconda parte si affrontano gli aspetti dinamici e quindi i flussi all'interno e tra i vari comparti, assieme al fenomeno del trasporto; nella terza parte sono invece introdotti i concetti di base relativi alle principali trasformazioni fisiche e chimiche associate alle interazioni tra energia e materia; infine nella quarta parte si affrontano i processi associati agli organismi viventi, per concludere con una introduzione alla climatologia.

Questo testo rappresenta un’avvio allo studio della Fisica del Terre-no,materia che si avvale dei concetti della fisica di base (meccanica, fluidodinamica etermodinamica) per sviluppare le conoscenze di un sistema poroso fondamentale sia per l’idrologia che per l’ambito del-le produzioni vegetali e dell’ecologia in generale.In questa introduzione si è cercato di dare agli argomenti trattati la sequenza e la gradualità a chi ha poca dimestichezza con il formali-smo matematico.La trattazione è arricchita di alcune note metodologiche ed esercizi, ma nel contempo tende a facilitare l’inquadramento della materia in un più ampio schema di studio.

European agriculture is undergoing a rapid evolution that challenges agronomic research to scale from field to landscape. In particular, the undergoing processes (e.g. urbanization or land abandonment) and the multiple ecosystems services provided by agricultural areas are requiring to broaden the research at the regional level. Since some decades, the European Union is promoting the collection of agricultural data to evaluate the farmers’ eligibility for subsidies and to assess the Common Agricultural Policy performances. Part of these datasets is being increasingly used beyond their administrative functions, as for the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) and the Land Parcel Identification System (LPIS). Starting from a bibliometric analysis of the scientific literature using these datasets, we will discuss two examples of their application for characterizing cropland and cropping systems. Our aim is to discuss the relevance of these datasets as tools to improve the monitoring and management of agroecosystems at the regional level., {"references":["Benoît, M., Rizzo, D., Marraccini, E., Moonen, A.C., Galli, M., Lardon, S., Rapey, H., Thenail, C., Bonari, E., 2012. Landscape agronomy: a new field for addressing agricultural landscape dynamics. Landsc. Ecol. 27, 1385–1394. doi:10.1007/s10980-012-9802-8","Bertaglia, M., Milenov, P., Angileri, V., Devos, W., 2016. Cropland and grassland management data needs from existing IACS sources (EUR - Scientific and Technical Research Reports). European Commission.","Boiffin, J., Benoît, M., Le Bail, M., Papy, F., Stengel, P., 2014. Agronomie, espace, territoire : travailler « pour et sur » le développement territorial, un enjeu pour l'agronomie. Cah. Agric. 23, 72–83. doi:10.1684/agr.2014.0688","Bradley, D., Hill, B., 2016. Diversity and Innovation in the FADN Data Collection Systems in the EU-28. EuroChoices 15, 5–10. doi:10.1111/1746-692X.12137","Dalgaard, T., Kjeldsen, C., Jørgensen, M.S., Hutchings, N., Mogensen, L., Sahrbacher, A., Damgaard, M., Happe, K., Piorr, A., 2009. Scaling from Farm to Landscape 175–189. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-79470-7_10","Grandgirard, D., Zielinsky, R., 2008. Land Parcel Identification System (LPIS) Anomalies' Sampling and Spatial Pattern: Towards convergence of ecological methodologies and GIS technologies. (EUR - Scientific and Technical Research Reports).","Latruffe, L., Piet, L., 2014. Does land fragmentation affect farm performance? A case study from Brittany, France. Agric. Syst. 129, 68–80. doi:10.1016/j.agsy.2014.05.005","Leenhardt, D., Angevin, F., Biarnès, A., Colbach, N., Mignolet, C., 2010. Describing and locating cropping systems on a regional scale. A review. Agron. Sustain. Dev. 30, 131–138. doi:10.1051/agro/2009002","Levavasseur, F., Martin, P., Bouty, C., Barbottin, A., Bretagnolle, V., Thérond, O., Scheurer, O., Piskiewicz, N., 2016. RPG Explorer: A new tool to ease the analysis of agricultural landscape dynamics with the Land Parcel Identification System. Comput. Electron. Agric. 127, 541–552. doi:10.1016/j.compag.2016.07.015","Plieninger, T., Draux, H., Fagerholm, N., Bieling, C., Bürgi, M., Kizos, T., Kuemmerle, T., Primdahl, J., Verburg, P.H., 2016. The driving forces of landscape change in Europe: A systematic review of the evidence. Land Use Policy 57, 204–214. doi:10.1016/j.landusepol.2016.04.040","Ruiz-Martinez, I., Marraccini, E., Debolini, M., Bonari, E., 2015. Indicators of agricultural intensity and intensification: a review of the literature. Ital. J. Agron. 10, 74. doi:10.4081/ija.2015.656","Sagris, V., 2013. Land Parcel Identification System conceptual model: development of geoinfo community conceptual model (PhD thesis). University of Tartu (Estonia).","Tancoigne, E., Barbier, M., Cointet, J.-P., Richard, G., 2014. The place of agricultural sciences in the literature on ecosystem services. Ecosyst. Serv. 10, 35–48.","Vitali, G., Cardillo, C., Albertazzi, S., Della Chiara, M., Baldoni, G., Signorotti, C., Trisorio, A., Canavari, M., 2012. Classification of Italian Farms in the FADN Database Combining Climate and Structural Information. Cartogr. Int. J. Geogr. Inf. Geovisualization 47, 228–236. doi:10.3138/carto.47.4.1478","Vitali, G., Rizzo, D., Baldoni, G., Bazzani, G.M., Cardillo, C., Canavari, M., 2016. A national pedoclimatic characterization of cropping schemes based on FADN Italian data, in: Farm and Land System Dynamics in the Mediterranean Basin: Integrating Spatial Scales, from the Local to the Global One. Presented at the AgroMed International Conference, Avignon (FRA)."]}

Global Research Alliance on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases - ESTABLISHED: December 2009, United Nations Climate Change Conference, Copenhagen, Denmark; PURPOSE: Facilitate research, development and extension of technologies and practices that will help deliver ways to grow more food (and more climate-resilient food systems) without growing greenhouse gas emissions; CURRENT MEMBERSHIP: 46 countries (Europe, Americas, Asia Pacific, Africa)

The recent Common Agricultural Policy reform (CAP14) at the European level links the granting of aid to farmers to adhering to environmentally-friendly farming practices. It therefore becomes important to assess the overall effectiveness of such a policy by taking into account different economic and environmental criteria. In this work, an ex ante assessment of different agricultural policy scenarios in Italy is undertaken at the national level, through the adoption of a fuzzy multi-criteria analysis approach, to account for the different economic and environmental aspects (indicators) of each scenario. Italian agricultural holdings were divided into homogeneous groups (according to farm typology, location, and environment), in order to determine the most preferable scenario for each group. Results are extremely heterogeneous across the macro areas, the farm typologies, and the climatic zones, and it is not possible to determine a ‘good-for-all’ scenario. However, we can observe that when all indicators are assigned an equal weight and also when environmental indicators are assigned a higher weight, the preferred scenario for the majority of groups is the alternative scenario where a tax of 30% on pesticides is added to the CAP14. On the other side, when economic indicators have a higher weight, the situation of subsidies preceding CAP14 (base subsidies and environmental subsidies, with no differentiation among conventional and organic farming) seems to be the ‘best’ scenario for all groups, with one exception.

Runoff is one of the major causes of soil loss in the hilly areas of Italy. It is possible to successfully prevent the phenomenon by an adequate drainage of water in the agricultural areas, via the modelling of soil surface, and choosing the proper tillage and crop. The best soil management is selected by a deep knowledge of the chemical and physical properties of the soil, of the topography and the land use. In order to study the problem in detail, a field experiment was carried out in the hillside next to Bologna, Italy (Ozzano dell’Emilia, 44°24'N, 11°28' E, 185 m a.s.l.) for a 17-year-long period (1992-2009). In this experiment the effect on runoff of field crops (wheat, sorghum, rye-grass and alfalfa) and orchard (cherry trees), with different slopes and land modelling was evaluated. The crops were cultivated with various field modelling, in 5 plots 1000 m2 large . The soil was sandy-loam and the tillage management was performed as in the common practice of the area. Precipitation was continuously measured thanks to a meteorological station next to the area and each plot was equipped by runoff ditches and measurement gauges. The results show that, between the permanent crops, cherry trees was always more efficient than alfalfa in minimizing runoff, independently from slope and management of the alfalfa. As an average of the entire period, the number of runoff events was the highest in the plots diagonally cultivated and was the lowest in the plot cultivated following the contour lines. The up-and-down modelling gave good results in controlling the runoff. A significant relationship was evidenced between the total amount of rainfall during the farming year and the mean number of runoff events, irrespectively of the crop.

Il ruscellamento superficiale è una delle principali cause di perdita di suolo nei terreni in pendio. Ruscellamento ed erosione sono processi naturali che possono essere fortemente accelerati nei terreni coltivati. La pendenza, la copertura vegetale e la direzione di lavorazione (che dipende dalla sistemazione agronomica) sono, insieme all’andamento meteorologico, tra i fattori più rilevanti di questi processi (Ampofo et al., 2002; Zhang & Garbrecht, 2002). Scopo di questo studio è stato verificare la relazione tra pioggia e ruscellamento e le caratteristiche del ruscellamento in sei parcelle di diversa sistemazione agronomica e pendenza, coltivate con specie erbacee annuali e poliennali ed arboree. Si tratta di una prova di lunga durata che ha previsto la raccolta e l’elaborazione di quasi un ventennio di dati (1992-2010).

Computer 3D drawing is a task that is performed in a number of different ways as it is attested by the number of software tools designed to capture the geometry of real world objects. One major problem of 3D application programs is the time the user requires to become familiar with the environment and learn basic capabilities, which can range from a few days to months: these difficulties increase further when dealing with a complicated geometry as that of a tree. Most of time is required to develop a 3D perception in a 2D environment (the PC console). PlantToon was developed from previous experience on software born for editing and navigating plants scanned with a digitizing-arm (Magnanini e al., 1998). The present version allows to import a digitized tree, but its main objective is to teach pruning techniques, so it allows for drawing a plant from scratch and then lets the user cut and remove branches, realistically. Expert pruners were consulted during the development of PlantToon and their suggestions were used to build a plant-drawing oriented 3D-CAD tool with particular innovations that allows the ability to draw a plant quickly. PlantToon uses a single canvas for the 3D structure of the plant, and a new technique for navigation. A tool palette allows the user to add, delete, move, and select objects such as the trunk, primary and secondary branches, shoots, twigs, suckers, etc. and more objects are added gradually according to a hierarchical organization. The topological structure, together with 3D graphics is easy to navigate, allowing a user to adjust pruning to information such as age, number of buds or fruit load. The 3D rendering offers the users-view to move as in the field. PlantToon also allows to operate stereoscopically using the anaglyph technique so as to give the pruner the opportunity to “get inside the scene” using common blue-red spectacles. PlantToon was developed to draw fruit trees as in their dormant state. Foliage is not considered in the present version, both because of the problems leaves make for reading branch structure, and because pruning usually is performed in the period with no foliage. In the future we plan to develop methods for exporting PlantToon drawings in formats allowing to exchange a virtual tree via the Internet or with a growth simulation engine, and to record details on branches and fruits. PlantToon has been written in VB6 (under MS-Windows) and is available as a demo from the author.

Recently the sector of Functional Structural Plant Modeling (FSPM) has significatively grown (AA.VV., 2004,2007) attracting the attention of researchers from several branches of biological sciences. Objective of FSP Modelers is using a morphological characterization to improve plant eco-physiological modeling. In some case they move from pure mathematical and geometrical simulators used in animation movies and landscape design, in other cases they are to interpretate external characters of a plant. Several tools has been developed, some freely downloadable, others with a commercial mean. Even when they are available at a collaborative level, the plant simulating engine is often embedded with graphics and few efforts has been made to distinguish the task of making a plant from that of representing it on a screen which also means define a standard to code plants. Communicating a virtual plant between programs with different purposes not only allow for a better use of computer resourses but could allow for plants interchange between researchers. The development of the project required to define and reach several objectives, as the possibility to work on a virtual-plant project at a team level, with different skillness and competencies, and to define a standard language to represent plant structure separated from the geometrical features. Even if the first objective was fullfilled, it seems to require a powerful server when more clients are run at same time, as in web-games. About the second it is probably a former step toward a proposal for an open format for interchange plants at structural level. The simulator, is at present very simple and is still lacking a radiative environment. Java3D allows for self-shading but not for reciprocal shading. Other features which could be important for realistic rendering is physical collisions and gravity, both important to improve space occupation of elements parts in light and other atmospheric interactions. From the other side, the system is per se, already able to simulate a number of plants.

In Functional Structural Plant Modeling a main objective is the comprehension of the interaction between plant morphology and environment, which means the need of developing tools allowing the user to validate a mathematical model on the basis of its graphical output: the Virtual Plant (VP). In this study a client-server approach has been used to have the VP simulation engine apart from the VP rendering, easy to be used also on the internet, whose parts could be developed apart by different competencies (engine developer, parameter estimator, tester) and using different computing resources. Client and server applications communicate using the SOAP protocol, which is used to exchange XML documents. An XML dialect (Virtual Plant Modeling Language – VPML) has been coined to code statically a plant grown within a give environment (climate) and a time interval. VPML may code a single plantule as much as a full plant history, made of several snapshots taken during the growing period. VPML only maps plant structure, that is how plant modules (internode, bud, petiole, blade) are connected, together with the values of their parameters, both graphical and physiological. Graphic features of plant modules are got from separate VRML files, and used on the client to build- up the VP graphic aspect. The client also allows the user to interact with the virtual plant profiting of the native features of Java3D: user can select, query and prune single modules and submit the modified plant to the server to have it grown to another date.

Evaluating energetic, materials and biodiversity indicators of different agricultural approaches has recently become of large interest because of human need of accounting for sustainability. Organic cropping systems, considered by several governments in terms of benefits to environment and human health, is also looking for effective ways to communicate added value of organic produce to consumers through certification process. So, quality certification techniques, which try to grant the consumer for a quality which is not appreciable from common senses, required measurement tools as indicators, especially those able to compare conventional to organic farms. Even in the past years a lot of indicators have been proposed, they mostly lack of transparency especially those related to the farm scale. This problem is mainly due to the complexity of the system used to collect, query and assemble information. This analysis uses an object-oriented approach to develop a tool to represent farm structure and to make easier and transparent farm-scale indicator evaluation. The data structure developed in this analysis revealed to be able to reflect the farm information structure both to develop an efficient questionnaire and to host records from farm books and calendars. It also made effective in hosting indicator algorithms, making the computational pathway transparent and easily to be checked, fitting with other object-oriented approaches finalised to simulation (Carlson et al., 2009), and easy to host a gap-filling procedure, required because of a lack of information on questionnaires. Such a problem in particular could be due to the quality of farmer response, occurring when a large amount of questionnaires are submitted on a territory, as much as when character of local products are missing: think of manure used as soil amendment or specific varieties for which production or composition should require specific analysis. Production of those precise information would not influence nor policy making nor communication whereas indicators estimates need to be produced in few time and containing costs.

Nel lavoro, dopo un'impostazione del problema basato sulle definizioni di base ed un esame della recente letteratura internazionale ed italiana, si ottiene un metodo per la valutazione della curva di risposta produttiva all'irrigazione utile per analisi di scenari economici. Il metodo viene poi sviluppato per le principali colture irrgue di 3 significativi contesti produttivi italiani, permettendo di identificare cirve di risposta utilizzate nelle valutazioni economiche (altri articoli del volume) per la valutazione degli impatti sull'ordinamento colturale delle aziende al variare del prezzo dell'acqua.

le conoscenze di base della meteorologia e dell'ecologia per la progettazione del territorio anche urbano

Il progetto SABIO è volto alla valutazione della Agricoltura Biologica ed in particolare alla possibilità di definire degli strumenti di comparazione con l’agricoltura tradizionale. In questo lavoro si affronta la problematica dal punto di vista agro-ambientale, con l’obiettivo di definire un metodo di analisi e di metterlo alla prova su una serie di casi concreti. La strada che si è scelto di intraprendere è quella degli indicatori, assai battuta in letteratura, ma ancora priva di uno schema investigativo univoco. Questo studio ha cercato in primo luogo di mettere in luce aspetti non di poco conto quali la complessità metodologica insita nella identificazione degli indicatori e nel loro utilizzo operativo, aspetti legati alla struttura del sistema da valutare e dei processi coinvolti, alla cui descrizione e differenze sono legati gli obiettivi ultimi dell’indagine. Nel primo capitolo si introduce brevemente il lettore al concetto di sistema produttivo, passando in rassegna dagli elementi di base alle peculiarità dei principali approcci agronomici. Viene quindi introdotto il concetto di indicatore e passate in rassegna le categorie di indicatori utilizzati per la valutazione di sistemi agro-ambientali. Nel secondo capitolo si descrive il processo che porta alla sintesi del sistema di indicatori utilizzati in questo studio. Nel terzo capitolo si definiscono le metodiche di valutazione in relazione alle diverse tipologie di rilievo considerate. Si descrive infine lo schema dei rilievi effettuati. Nel quarto capitolo si riportano infine i risultati ottenuti, discutendo gli stessi e traendo le conclusioni finali.