Evaluation of the application potential of IT tools and development of a prototype demonstrator web application for the management of “Carbon Farming”

This Action coordinated by Terrasystem with the support of FederlegnoArredo, Confagricoltura e Università degli Studi della Tuscia di Viterbo, has the main objective to design and develop an IT Web tool useful to produce scenarios related to carbon farming practices. This tool has the goal of supporting decision making by public authorities at the regional scale and to provide useful information for farms.

The first activity of this action is to review a selection of existing IT Tools for farm management in order to assess their potential and gaps in the application of Carbon Farming practices. These tools, mainly represented by commercial software but also by modelling software developed within European research projects, are basically conceived as Decision Support Systems (DSS) and support systems for the crops and farm management. The outputs of this activity are a brochure and an open source repository of the applications. The repository will include information about  description of main features of the tools, kind of data feeding the DSS (e.g. satellite, agrometeo, agricultural databases), carbon farming practices considered, and so on. Also, a summary comparative table of the systems will be provided.

The second activity of the Action is the development of a prototype Web application, for the simulation of different scenarios on the potential for CO₂ sequestration and/or emission reductions associated with the adoption of carbon farming practices. The application will allow both analysis at farm level and at regional level, based on the use of pre-set algorithms defined in C-FARMs previous actions A2 and A4 and will integrate the indication that will come from A5. 

Through maps, graphs and tables, users can assess the current carbon stock of their fields and the potential change in carbon stock related to the adoption of carbon farming practices. The prototype application will be used on the pilot farms included in next project actions and will also be a demonstrator available to users within the project website.