Flavio Lupia

Council for Agricultural Research and Economics · Research Centre for Agricultural Policies and Bioeconomy

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) represents a growing source of potentially valuable data for many applications, including land cover map validation. It is still an emerging field and many different approaches can be used to take value from VGI, but also many pros and cons are related to its use. Therefore, since it is timely to get an over...

Google Earth (GE) has recently become the focus of increasing interest and popularity among available online virtual globes used in scientific research projects, due to the free and easily accessed satellite imagery provided with global coverage. Nevertheless, the uses of this service raises several research questions on the quality and uncertainty...

Urban agriculture (UA) is a worldwide growing phenomenon.In the metropolitan areas of the Global North, UA is not simply a food production activity but also a mean for social aggregation and for urban environmental sustainability. In this context, today, the spatial representations of the urban environment are enriched with a new layer: the cultiva...

The MARSALa (Modelling Approach for irrigation wateR eStimation at fArm Level) project has been realized in the framework of the Eurostat Grant Programme 2008 (Theme “Pilot studies for estimating the volume of water used for irrigation”) with the Grant Agreement awarded to the Italian Institute for Agricultural Economics (INEA). Aim of the project...

During the last decade, Crowdsourced Geographic Information or Volunteered Geographic Information has attracted the attention of the research community to explore this vast amount of data and extract useful information for various applications. Among these, geotagged photos shared publicly online have been explored as potential source for Land Use/...

Chapter 3 WEFE nexus adaptation and mitigation strategies. In: Interlinking climate change with the Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystems (WEFE) nexus in the Mediterranean Basin. Mediterranean Experts on Climate and environmental Change (MedECC) Reports. MedECC Secretariat, Marseille, France.

Climate change poses significant challenges to agricultural systems in the Mediterranean region, with Italy being significantly affected. This literature scoping review aims to examine existing research on the impact of climate change on yield and income on the three agri-food value chains in Italy: viticulture, fruit and vegetables, and dairy catt...

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This paper provides a systematic literature review regarding climate change impact on agriculture. Applying the systematic literature review, a sample of 44 studies published over the last 20 years was reviewed through descriptive and content analysis. This study shows, both based on projections meteorological for the coming decades and based on me...

This paper provides a systematic literature review regarding climate change impact on agriculture. Applying the systematic literature review, a sample of 43 studies published over the last 20 years was reviewed through descriptive and content analysis. This study shows, both based on projections meteorological for the coming decades and based on me...

Highly managed Mediterranean river basins are facing considerable environmental management challenges. Water resource managers are increasingly concerned about the allocation of limited water resources, environmental quality concerns and planning under present and future climatic change and uncertainty. We implemented a watershed-scale eco-hydrolog...

The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) enables the simulation of watershed and river basin quantity and quality of surface and ground water under the influence of land use, management, and climate change. It can be used to monitor and control soil erosion, non-point source pollution and basin management. The recent version (SWAT+) was implemente...

Current and future scenarios for global agricultural systems under a changing climate require innovative approaches, novel datasets, and methods for improving environmental resource management and better data-driven decision-making [...]

Bioenergy from renewable resources plays a central role in the transition toward net-zero emission of carbon dioxide and low-energy circular economy. The main objective of this work was to examine the main challenges and opportunities for producing renewable biomass feedstocks and developing realistic bioenergy value chain s in the European Union....

Agricultural land-use effect on water quality (surface and groundwater) is a well-known issue, and actions are needed to reduce the impacts of farm inputs management. Direct and indirect links can also be found with some of the SDGs (i.e., SDG 6—Clean water and sanitation). Assessing these impacts can support the definition of sustainable managemen...

The European Commission fosters the opening and reusing the Integrated Administration and Control Systems (IACS) administrative data from the European paying agencies as useful tools for monitoring the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) performances. In this scenario, the Open IACS project goes in the same direction by demonstrating reuse of the IACS...

Availability of georeferenced yield data involving different crops over years, and their use in future crop management, are a subject of growing debate. In a 9 hectare field in Northern Italy, seven years of yield data, including wheat (3 years), maize for biomass (2 years), sunflower, and sorghum, and comprising remote (Landsat) normalized differe...

Monitoring of grassland (both permanent, i.e., more than five years and, temporary typologies) is relevant for the ecosystem perspective and for agricultural sustainability. Assessing the spatial and areal extent of grassland at country and sub-country level, is relevant for a number of ecosystem services, agri-environmental indicators and EU polic...

Eco-hydrological models, such as SWAT (Soil Water Assessment Tool), are used to simulate complex hydrological processes and LU management in relation to water quality and quantity on a wide range of ecosystems. SWAT, developed by United States Department of Agriculture, is one of the most widely used watershed-scale modelling to assess changes in l...

Politiche e strumenti per una gestione sostenibile del suolo - Il suolo riveste un ruolo centrale negli equilibri ecosistemici, contribuendo alla regolazione del ciclo naturale dell’acqua, dell’aria e delle sostanze organiche e minerali, alla conservazione della biodiversità e non ultimo alla stabilità climatica. In particolare, i suoli agricoli, c...

OBJECTIVES: The Open IACS project aims at opening the administrative data from agricultural payment agencies to demonstrate their usability for computing indicators and running models by also integrating different data sources (e.g., environmental data). The administrative data managed within the Integrated Administration and Control Systems (IACS)...

Open LOD platform based on HPC capabilities for Integrated Administration and Control System of Common Agrarian Policy (Open IACS) is an EU funded project (4.5 MEur) fostering the administrative data reuse in the context of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) and granting open access to farmers, policy makers and third parties. Data from European...

The consequences of climate change on food security in arid and semi-arid regions can be serious. Understanding climate change impacts on water balance is critical to assess future crop performance and develop sustainable adaptation strategies. This paper presents a climate change impact study on the water balance components of an agricultural wate...

The new reforming Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) will be the instrument to push farmers toward sustainable practices. Monitoring the CAP interventions requires detailed and quality-assured data that are mainly managed by Paying Agencies with the Integrated Administration and Control System (IACS) and the Land Parcel Information System (LPIS). The...

ABTRACT Soil and weather data were used to analyse spatio-temporal yield patterns of winter cereals (wheat) and spring dicots (sunflower and coriander) in an 11-ha field in Northern Italy (44.5° N, 12.2° E), during 2010–2014. Three yield stability classes (YSCs) were established over multiple years, based on spatio-temporal characteristics across t...

Lo studio dei corpi idrici superficiali (fiumi, laghi, invasi artificiali) costituisce una componente importante per la valutazione del ciclo dell’acqua e delle sue relazioni nell’ambito dell’ecosistema globale e del clima. L’interpretazione dei vari fenomeni idrologici e la corretta pianificazione e gestione delle risorse idriche, oggi anche nell’...

L’analisi morfometrica di bacino e del reticolo idrografico è di fondamentale importanza nello studio dei processi morfogenetici del territorio consentendo la descrizione quantitativa del sistema di drenaggio e la realizzazione di studi di modellizzazione idrologica che analizzano le relazioni tra afflussi meteorici e deflussi superficiali. Inoltre...

The ever-growing availability of Earth Observation (EO) data is demonstrating a wide range of potential applications in the realm of land management. On the other hand, large volumes of data need to be handled and analysed to extract meaningful information and Geomatics coupled with new approaches such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Le...

The process of delimitation of the Italian agricultural areas affected by natural constraints (ANCs, rif. EU regulation no 1305 2013): methodology and results.

The COVID-19 emergency has revealed the extreme fragility of large cities to unexpected complex global risks and crises. City lockdown has led to increasing awareness of the vital importance of food availability for citizens. The combined effect of border closure and movement restrictions increased food losses and export costs, especially for veget...

L’esigenza di un uso efficiente dei dati e l’utilizzo di metodi innovativi per gli OP è stata recepita a livello europeo e catalizzata nell’ambito del programma di ricerca Horizon 2020, che ha portato al finanziamento del principale progetto europeo di innovazione per i Sistemi Integrati di Gestione e Controllo: il progetto New IACS Vision in Actio...

Over the past decade, a growing body of literature recognizes the importance of urban agriculture (UA) as relevant phenomenon able to interconnect a range of environmental, economic, and social issues in urban areas. In parallel with food production, UA contributes to climate change mitigation, biodiversity promotion, rainwater regulation, and cult...

Predicting the availability and quality of freshwater resources is a pressing concern in the Mediterranean area, where a number of agricultural systems depend solely on precipitation. This study aims at predicting streamflow and nonpoint pollutant loads in a temporary river system in the Mediterranean basin (Sulcis area, Sardinia, Italy). Monthly d...

Assessing crop yield trends over years is a key step in site specific management, in view of improving the economic and environmental profile of agriculture. This study was conducted in a 11.07 ha area under Mediterranean climate in Northern Italy to evaluate the spatial variability and the relationships between six remotely sensed vegetation indic...

The 2013 Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) reform established to apply certain criteria to designate Areas with Natural Constraints (ANCs) to be later used in the payment schemes provided by the 2014-2020 Rural Development Programmes (RDPs). ANCs payments support farmers in those areas where natural constraints (i.e. climate, morphology and soil) lim...

Five years georeferenced grain harvest data were filtered (Sudduth & Drummond, 2007) to obtain the final grain yield (GY). An average 6170 GY data points per year were archived in a 11.07 ha experimental field located in a flat area in Northern Italy (44.5° N, 12.1° E). Multispectral images were downloaded from the USGS Earth Explorer data hub w...

Climate change is a challenge for urban agriculture with potential escalation throughout the upcoming years. Recently, temperatures and precipitations have respectively increased and intensified. These impacts have important effects on crop yields and expected profitability. Consequently, crop modelling becomes relevant for understanding the soil-p...

[EN] This contribution reports the results of the application of the JRC guidelines to identify Italian agricultural areas, other than mountain areas, facing significant natural constraints (Areas with Natural Constraints – ANCs). Spatial analysis has been carried out to integrate climatic, soil, terrain and agricultural data. The latter were integ...

Urban agriculture in Global North cities is strongly promoted as a sustainable solution to achieve different goals, such as food production, quality of life, and well-being. Although several attempts have been made to evaluate urban agriculture production, few studies have investigated food production in a multitemporal geospatial way and considere...

Il consumo di suolo – Il consumo di suolo (CdS), fenomeno determinato dalle dinamiche insediative ed infrastrutturali, è da anni oggetto di dibattito politico ed analisi scientifica, a livello internazionale e nazionale, per la crescente impermeabilizzazione, sia delle superfici agricole e naturali, sia per gli effetti di degrado del suolo e di per...

The cultivation of marginal lands for bioenergy production has recently become a topic of research interest for the agronomic and agricultural economy scientific communities. The growing availability of arable land in the Mediterranean regions, as a consequence of the decline of cereal cropping systems and grain legume, provides ample opportunities...

The paper proposes a methodology to assess water consump- tion in urban agriculture. Green and blue water footprints were calculated for five selected community gardens (CGs) in Rome (Italy) based on weather, crops, and yields. Then, the water requirement for all the CGs of the city, identified by means of a geodatabase, was estimated. For a cultiv...

The Copernicus Programme is the European effort to monitor the Earth and ecosystems by providing Earth Observation information and services to handle a broad range of challenges (e.g. climate change, transports, sustainable development, regional and local planning, security, health, agriculture, etc.). Copernicus information are collected through a...

big leap in the agricultural sector is expected thanks to the operational deployment of Copernicus data and services, the new Earth Observation program of the European Commission. The huge quantity of data delivered freely along with the good level of resolution (spatial, temporal and spectral) will open up new opportunities for achieving the well-...

In the upcoming years bioenergy production in the European Union (EU) is expected to grow significantly in order to meet the targets of the new Renewable Energy Directive (RED II). To this end, marginal, contaminated and underutilized lands in Mediterranean regions have the potential to contribute to meeting EU goals through the production of susta...

The Rural Development Framework is supporting farmers in areas affected by natural constraints (i.e. climate, morphology and soil) to counterbalance negative phenomena such as land abandonment, desertification, etc.. The designation of the new Areas with Natural Constraints (ANCs) is being carried out by EU Member States (Reg. (EU) No. 1305/2013)....

Il contributo riprende le principali tappe del processo di delimitazione delle zone agricole italiane soggette a limitazioni naturali, in base a quanto previsto dal regolamento comunitario sullo sviluppo rurale attualmente vigente. Questa esigenza ha reso necessario un complesso processo metodologico che ha visto il coinvolgimento di competenze mul...

Water managers need map of irrigated areas (defined as the identification of their location and their areal extent) to plan a rational use of water under limited availability and to prevent the unauthorized withdrawals. Many authors have shown that the Earth Observation techniques are an effective tool for mapping irrigated areas worldwide at diffe...

Urban agriculture is being recognized as spreading activity in many metropolitan areas with positive impacts on the socio-economic sphere, favouring forms of sustainable urban environments. A stepping stone for analysing potential benefits, sustainability aspects and to define planning strategies is the availability of high resolution land use data...

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has become a rich and well established source of geospatial data. From the popular OpenStreetMap (OSM) to many citizen science projects and social network platforms, the amount of geographically referenced information that is constantly being generated by citizens is burgeoning. The main issue that continues...

Digital humanitarians represent the current generation of volunteers, providing timely contributions in the form of digital map data in the aftermath of natural disasters. Starting from the tragic 2010 earthquake in Haiti and thanks to the success of the OpenStreetMap (OSM) project, the presence and coordination of these volunteers have grown incre...

Homegrown fruits and vegetables are gaining popularity in many metropolitan areas with several facets connected to the wider urban agriculture phenomenon. At the same time, the relationship between urban food production and irrigation water is pivotal in terms of resource management. In this paper, we investigated water savings through the collecti...

A dimensionless methodology to evaluate the water saving obtainable from large-scale implementation of domestic rain water harvesting (RWH) systems in urban areas is presented. The methodology combines the use of regressive relationships for water saving evaluation based on the results of the dimensionless rainwater tank water balance and of catchm...

Availability of up-to-date geographic datasets, including the information voluntarily created by ordinary people, is crucial for disaster management in areas affected by catastrophic events and humanitarian crises. OpenStreetMap (OSM) is the most popular Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) project that has been extensively used for collaborati...

In the context of environmental sustainability there has been an increasing interest in bioenergy production from renewable resources, and is expected that European biofuel production from energy crops will increase as a consequence of the achievement of policy targets. The aim of this paper is to assess the agronomic feasibility of biomass crop cu...

Agriculture accounts between 2 and 3 percent of national energy consumption even if direct and indirect energy uses constitute an important part of farmer's costs. Furthermore, the considerable increase of energy prices in the past years, affected significantly farmers, generating disturbing effects on production costs. This paper present a novel a...

Water managers need map of irrigated areas (defined as the identification of their location and their areal extent) to plan a rational use of water under limited availability and to prevent the unauthorized withdrawals. Many authors have shown that the Earth Observation techniques are an effective tool for mapping irrigated areas worldwide at diffe...

The practice of urban agriculture is an answer to periods of economic and social crisis and it aims at producing food, especially vegetables, thus contributing to livelihood (even social) of people living in urban areas, where the access to natural resources is more limited. In this sense, urban agriculture is emerging as a new competitor for natur...

Geo-tagged photographs are used increasingly as a source of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI), which could potentially be used for land use and land cover applications. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the feasibility of using this source of spatial information for three use cases related to land cover: Calibration, validation and ver...

Le potenzialità dell’agricoltura urbana (AU) sono state evidenziate da numerosi studi, che hanno messo in evidenza come essa rappresenti un valido strumento per contribuire a tessere legami sociali anche in situazioni di forte degrado o crisi; a preservare e migliorare la qualità della vita delle popolazioni urbane; ad assicurare alimenti sani e nu...

Globally, crop evapotranspiration has increased with the expansion of agricultural lands and irrigated areas. In particular, two components of crop water use can be defined: green water use (GW) as the crop evapotranspiration steaming from rain infiltrated on soil, and blue water use (BW) as the amount of crop evapotranspiration steaming from irrig...

The strategies to cope with future climate ch ange scenarios need to take into account the water use at local level, especially in urban areas where water demand and water conflicts among different users may be relevant. In recent years, urban agriculture is emerging as new competitor among the users of water available in many metropolitan areas, d...

Water managers need map of irrigated areas (defined as the identification of their location and their areal extent) to plan a rational use of water under limited availability and to prevent the unauthorized withdrawals. Many authors have shown that the Earth Observation techniques are an effective tool for mapping irrigated areas worldwide at diffe...

Nel 2014, nell’ambito del progetto “Promozione della cultura contadina” coordinato dal CREA (ex-Istituto Nazionale di Economia Agraria), è stata sviluppata una metodologia per la mappatura spaziale dell’agricoltura urbana utilizzando dati telerilevati e strumenti di web-mapping1 liberamente disponibili. L’obiettivo principale è stato quello di inqu...

Earth Observation (EO) for agricultural water management is a mature technology and it is ready for being transferred to operational applications. Presently, some systems based on EO data are used in Irrigation Advisory Services (IASs) and are recognized as useful tools for improving water management in agriculture. EO-based IASs provide new servic...

The process of globalization and industrialization has affected the food production and distribution system causing the marginalization of the local food production, as well as several environmental and social issues such as pollution, loss of biodiversity, changes in life-style and healthy and nutritional problems. In the last decade citizens int...

In many metropolitan areas of the Global North food cultivation in vacant spaces or in private gardens is a continuously growing trend. Irrigation is one of the main inputs in this production process calling for considerations about available water resources, especially in Mediterranean cities where water shortage can be common. Therefore, planning...

Today, Irrigation Advisory Services (IAS) using data derived from satellite imagery are valid tools for supporting irrigation management at different spatial scale. These service they produce a huge amount of multitemporal data for a wide variety of irrigated crops for several irrigation districts that could be potentially used for computing water...

In the last decade citizens interest toward local food production, food sustainability and environmental stewardship has grown exponentially and urban agriculture (UA) is nowadays one of the answer to this new collective awareness. The analysis of the spatial dimension of UA in metropolitan areas is the starting point for investigating its characte...

La risorsa suolo (la terra) è diventata una risorsa molto limitata. Negli ultimi anni si sta assistendo ad un intensificarsi dei processi di degradazione del suolo, in particolare al consumo di suolo agricolo, dovuti ad una non corretta gestione del territorio (mancanza di equilibrio tra aree agricole e aree edificate). Pertanto, per consumo di suo...

Nitrogen (N) is one of the major limiting factors of crop production, and the crop uptake is highly variable within a single year, between years, sites, and crops. The uptake variability is influenced by numerous agronomic, environmental and genetic factors. Therefore, coefficients of nutrient content in crop production may vary between regions, re...