Who are you and what role do you play within your organization?
Terrasystem is a spin-off company of the DIBAF (Department for Innovation in Biological, Agri-Food and Forestry Systems) of the Tuscia University of Viterbo, born in 2004. The organization is specialized in innovation processes and technology transfer applied to agricultural and forestry monitoring, precision agriculture and digital agriculture 4.0.
Well rooted in national and international research, Terrasystem permanently collaborates with Universities and Research Institutions in the development of innovative techniques and methodologies for modeling and data processing.
Terrasystem makes use of a transversal and synergistic team with high skills in technical-scientific, agronomic, engineering and informatic subjects, all well represented within the C-FARMs project.
What activities do you carry out in your daily work?
Focused on the applications of geomatics, TS carries out integrated cartography, monitoring and predictive modeling projects/services through an integration of agro-meteorological data, remote sensing and GIS techniques, and web oriented Territorial Information Systems for institutions, farms and agro-industries.
How is the creation of the demonstration web application prototype for the management of Carbon Farming going?
In C-FARMs project, TS coordinates the actions related to the assessment of the application potential of IT tools and the development of a geo-spatial information system prototype that will allow the sector’s carbon emissions mitigation potential to be assessed at company and regional levels.
We are designing and developing the application requirements, which essentially concern the following aspects:
1) Method of displaying data and maps already defined and/or produced in action A4 “Creation of the High-resolution geographical information system for the reference region (GIS-FARMs)”
2) Statistical and simulation functions for the elaboration of scenarios (at farm and regional level)
3) Soil monitoring data entry/storage functionality by companies and other accredited entities
Are there any critical issues that you have registered so far in this work?
Until now, We did not find any critical issues, even if the topic is complex while the application must be simple so that it may be understandable even by non-experts.
Are the commercial and modeling software developed within the framework of European research projects that you are monitoring sufficient for the implementation of the activity?
One of the purposes of our action is to evaluate a selection of already existing informatic tools in relation to their potential in the application of Carbon Farming practices. We experienced that there are many digital agriculture applications and decision support tools (DSS) related to various aspects of agricultural management. Despite this framework, there are few tools related to Carbon Farming. In fact, within the research, we have identified just few tools suitable for C-FARMs which will have to be adapted to the territory object of our analysis and to the methodological specificities of the project.
In your opinion, can this action be easily implemented for other Italian regions?
This action has the potential to be easily implemented in other Italian regions; however, it will be necessary to verify the adopted data model in other regions and the availability of adequately updated input data which the system needs.
What are the next steps for this activity?
We expect the sharing and discussion of a proposal for general requirements regarding the functions to be made available to users.
On the basis of this proposal we will proceed with the design of the navigation, of the graphical interfaces and whith the organization of a relational database for data management.
