Irrigation Sustainability in the Land Use/Soil System in South Italy: Results from a GIS Simplified Approach and Future Methodological Developments - Water and Agriculture: Sustainability, Markets and Policies - page 242

Figure 2. Irrigated areas in Objective 1 Italian Regions

2.2.1 Land use
The nomenclature system (Table 1) — articulated at 4 th level CORINE Land
Cover — adopted in CASI 3 allow us to make crop distinctions only for some permanent
crops (vineyards, olives groves) while it isn't sufficiently detailed for irrigated arable land
(code 212) and irrigated fruit and berries plantations. In fact, for example, land use class
2121 — Irrigated industrial crops at spring/summer cycle — has inside different species
such as maize, sunflower, sugar beet, tobacco, sorghum, etc. with different CWR.
Thus, to reconstruct the land use, different alphanumeric data (administrative and
statistics information) on crop surfaces were integrated, using GIS procedures, with
CASI 3 cartographic data (land use classes/polygons) inside administrative aggregations
(municipalities, administrative irrigated areas).
The sources of alphanumeric data are the following:

ISTAT data, significant at provincial level and, in some cases, at Agriculture Regions 4
level

AGEA (Italian Payment Agency) farm subsidies data on CAP, significant at municipal
level

specific surveys Land Reclamation and Irrigation Consortium, regarding the irrigated
crop type.

4.

Group of contiguous municipalities with homogeneous natural (geology, climate, topography,
etc) and agricultural conditions, defined by the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT).