FLORAES – FLOod Regulating AgroEcosystem Services – assessment to improve flash flood management in small agricultural river basins
a cura del dott. Marco Lompi (Università degli Studi di Firenze) e del dott. Nikolas Galli (politecnico di Milano)
The FLORAES project proposes a refinement of the assessment of flood regulating ecosystem services (FRES) for agriculture, i.e., the effect that agricultural lands can have on the formation of floods due to their water retention capacity. While existing methods are based on simplified land cover change assessments, FLORAES aims at describing the seasonality and the agricultural specificity of the FRES, using agro-hydrological simulations of soil moisture alterations to provide crop- and time-specific initial conditions for flash floods risk models. The results of the project could demonstrate how different agricultural scenarios and practices can produce different responses to the same event in different seasons, with potential management applications in small agricultural river basins, including crop selection, irrigation scheduling, crop calendarization, as well as the improvement of alert systems.