Extended Abstract (536K)12B.2
Estimation of climatic risk for agriculture in a Mediterranean region
Andrea Motroni, Agrometeorological Service of Sardinia, Sassari, Italy; and P. Duce, D. Spano, and S. Canu
Land evaluation provides qualitative information cropping potential or vulnerability risk. It provides several methods to assess both capability for general land use and suitability for specific crop types. Risk assessment is a general term used to describe the study of decisions subject to uncertain consequences and it includes: risk estimation, evaluation and management. This paper presents an application of land evaluation for the estimation of agricultural climate risk on a local scale. Climatic, geographic and soil data from Sardinia, Italy, one of the largest islands in the Mediterranean sea, were analysed using a Land Capability for Agriculture (LCA) classification system, which comprises several classes based on a range of land quality and potential productivity. The climatic LCA classes were constructed using weather data to derive annual values of maximum soil moisture deficit and heat accumulation using GIS to perform spatial analysis. Sardinia was partitioned into homogeneous agro-climatic areas by considering weather data from about 50 stations throughout the region. The procedure was extended to the whole island using interpolated temperature and precipitation values. The risk assessment approach, based on Markov-chain analysis of prime and non-prime categories, was employed to include climatic variability in the land evaluation methodology. The risk assessment analysis was developed to estimate the mean return time (in years) from land capability category prime, with no or few limitations for agriculture, to land capability category non-prime, with more severe limitations. The impacts of climatic variability and risk were estimated for major crops in the most valuable agricultural areas of Sardinia. The results showed that the LCA methodology is a robust method for incorporating weather variability into land evaluation and for assessing climatic risk vulnerability of different agricultural zones at a local scale. This work was conducted as part of the core program CLIMAGRI funded by the Italian Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry.
Session 12B, Vegetation Response to Climate, Climate Variability, and Climate Change
Thursday, 31 October 2002, 1:30 PM-2:45 PM
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