Integrated Model To Predict European Land Use: Climate Change And Land Use In The Venice Lagoon Watershed

IMPEL (Integrated Model to Predict European Land use) is a research project financed by the European Commission, within the Fourth RTD Framework Programme. The IMPEL project aims to integrate physical and socio-economic models to evaluate the impact of climate change on European land use systems at the regional scale. IMPEL is spatially-distributed, based on a multidisciplinary, modular approach, and comprises: a) a climate module (Euroscen) to down-scale baseline climate data (gridded to 0.5° Lat/Long) and GCM climate change scenario datasets, using a stochastic weather generator; b) a soil and crop module (EuroAccess) to evaluate the soil water balance and crop yields for a wide range of European crops at the scale of soil map units (Evans et al., submitted); two versions of the model are available at increasing level of complexity and data requirement: EuroAccess I and II; c) a land degradation module (ImpelEro) to evaluate the impact of soil erosion and changes in soil quality on crop productivity at the scale of soil map units (de la Rosa et al., submitted); d) a socio-economic module (Sfarmod) to evaluate optimal land use allocation and management requirements at the scale of individual (generic) farms. The Italian group of the Impel Project has two main tasks: a) to contribute to the development of the socio-economic module, in particular as concerns the modelling of risk perception by farmers in farm management; b) the experimental application of the integrated model being developed by the research project to the territory of the Venice Lagoon Watershed (VLW). For this purpose a general framework of the activities has been drawn up, as shown in figure 1. This paper presents a brief report on simulations, carried out at a farm level, of climate-change scenarios as proposed by the IMPEL project. Simulations were carried out by integrating EuroAccess software with simulation farm models. The tests were done with linear and non-linear programming farm model.