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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-known sustainability of agriculture. At the same time, the new trends of crowdsourcing and citizen science are delivering a great deal of geographical data collected by ordinary users with a bottom-up process. The two type of data and their integration will be the base for the future application in the agricultural sector, albeit management of big geospatial dataset and quality of user generated data are issues to be addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban agriculture (UA) has been acknowledged for several positive effects such as access to fresh food, human activities moderation, agro-biodiversity and social and cultural relationships. In the city of Rome due to social and economic trends this kind of activity is spreading, but so far very few attempts have been addressed to inventorying the UA areas (e.g., community gardens, residential gardens, school gardens, illegal vegetable gardens, urban farms, etc.). Some mapping experiences have been carried out but all lack of a well-established methodology to be applied for a complete inventory. In this paper we propose a conceptual framework and methodology for mapping the UA in Rome through Earth Observation techniques by using the concepts of photointerpretation and the features of the most used web-mapping services. Google Earth has been used as a basic tool for visual interpretation and polygon digitalization, while other services have been used for the availability of additional features (e.g., the oblique view of Microsoft Bing Maps). The integration of the web-mapping services combined with ancillary data improved the UA site detection, allowing to define both the land use and the UA typologies. We argue that the integration of the web-mapping services for building urban agricultural land use datasets is cost-effective compared to processing commercial remote sensing images. The inventory can enable administrators to perform analysis about the interactions between agricultural activities and the urban environment, and to enact informed policies for green and vacant urban spaces management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 watershed in the Mediterranean region. The restructured version of the Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT+) model was used to simulate the hydrological components in the Sulcis watershed (Sardinia, Italy) for the baseline period and compared to future climate projections at the end of the 21st century. The model was forced using data from two Regional Climate Models under the representative concentration pathways RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 scenarios developed at a high resolution over the European domain. River discharge data were used to calibrate and validate the SWAT+ model for the baseline period, while the future hydrological response was evaluated for the mid-century (2006–2050) and late-century (2051–2098). The model simulations indicated a future increase in temperature, decrease in precipitation, and consequently increase in potential evapotranspiration in both RCP scenarios. Results show that these changes will significantly decrease water yield, surface runoff, groundwater recharge, and baseflow. These results highlight how hydrological components alteration by climate change can benefit from modelling high-resolution future scenarios that are useful for planning mitigation measures in agricultural semi-arid Mediterranean regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]