Soil water balance of a winter crop cultivated in Southern Italy as influenced by future climate

The climatic change induced by global warming is expected to modify the agricultural activity. An efficient management of the water resources is considered very important for Italy and in particular for Southern areas characterized by a typical Mediterranean climate in order to improve the economical and environmental sustainability of the agricultural activity. In particular, climate warming could have a substantial impact on some agronomical practices as the choice of the crops and/or varieties to be included in the cropping systems, the sowing time, conservative tillage for reducing soil evaporation and runoff and increasing water infiltration. Concerning the irrigation management, the scheduling, the method choice and the soil water status monitoring are the most important factor to be optimized in order to obtain high value of water use efficiency (WUE). In this paper we applied SWAP model to optimize the management for scarola, cultivated in winter period in a farm located in the Metapontino Area in the Jonical costal zone of Southern Italy.