Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
The EU has financed, inside Reg. (CEE) n. 2081/93 - QCS 1994/99, the Operative
Programme (P.O.) “Water Resource, in Objective 1 Italian Regions”. This project was
finalised to the realisation of a geographic information system for water resources
management in agriculture (SIGRIA). INEA has collected data on irrigation infrastructure
and on crop water requirements in all the Southern Italy Regions Land Reclamation and
Irrigation Consortium (Italian administrative structure for irrigation water management).
Thanks to the availability (at EU and national level) of several databases related to
water use and to more accessible GIS technologies and data sources, monitoring and
measuring water use efficiency and sustainability is now a concrete and suitable
possibility.
In this paper particularly attention is paid on the sustainability of irrigation in South
Italy, taking into specific consideration the interaction between irrigated land use,
irrigation soil suitability and three different irrigation techniques, to support water
resources management. The methodological approach is based on the use of GIS.
A new research project started from this experience is now developing new
methodologies and quantitative methods in order to define specific indicators on water
use efficiency based on the integrated soil-crop-irrigation technique system, and on the
related optimal crop water requirement.
The geographic localisation, at soil/land use cross-combined poligon level, of soil
irrigation sustainability is a key element to support water managers and decision makers
in planning water use distribution in competitive water source use situations, and in
planning water distrubution pipelines realisation. Using land use and soil maps and
information on irrigation requirements, is possible to define areas suitable or not suitable
to be irrigated, according to their territorial characteristics.
1. Study areas
The work covers all the irrigated areas of Objective 1 Italian Regions (Figure 1). Data
were collected and organised at “Land Reclamation and Irrigation Consortium” and
regional (NUTS II) level. In South Italy 66 “consortia” manage an area of 8358165
hectares. To detect all the irrigated surfaces (about 1 600 000 hectares, inside and outside
administrative boundaries of the “consortium”), a land use map ( Irrigation Study Areas
Map CASI 3: scale 1:50000) has been realised, using remote sensing technology on three
different Landsat TM images (thematic accuracy: 1:50000 scale), referring to three
different years and three different seasons (autumn, spring and summer), and digital
ortho-photos (greyscale with pixel of 1 m - geometric and geographic base of the whole
system) for geometric accuracy (1:25000 scale). The study area (about 6 500 000
hectares) was previously mapped, thanks to the superimposition of different cartographic
layers (DTM, CORINE Land Cover, irrigated areas).
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