Adaptation and sustainability of water management for rice agriculture in temperate regions: The Italian case‐study

Abstract

We review, analyse, and discuss the recent evolution and the future sustainability of rice paddy fields in Italy-the largest European producer-using outcomes from available literature and new analysis of agricultural statistics from local authorities, landuse and surface temperature data from remote sensing, hydrological and climate data from observations, and numerical models. We show that Italy can be considered a good representative for rice cultivation in temperate regions that are not freshwater-limited. However, this situation is changing. We report strong evidence linking the largest European reduction of seasonal surface water that have gradually occurred since 2000 over the rice cultivation area of Northern Italy, to the change in paddy management from traditional continuous flooding to a less greenhousegases-emitting practice, that is, dry-seeding with postponed flooding. This change was accompanied by several improvements in agro-practices and crop varieties. Concurrently, regional climate rapidly shifted towards sunnier weather conditions that partly contributed to higher rice yields and stability, decoupling yields from interannual climate variability, but also reducing water availability. In Northern Italy, a complete shift of rice cultivation towards dry-seeding is not compatible with seasonal water availability, and a number of drawbacks, with respect to the traditional wet seeding, are also identified from literature review. Therefore, in the context of near-term climate change, sustainable rice cultivation in the middle latitudes seems achievable (without limiting production and/or increasing volatility) by balancing traditional and dry-seeding.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Relationship between weedy rice (Oryza sativa) infestation level and agronomic practices in Italian rice farms

“…In the last 20 yr, the adoption of rice dry seeding has increased in Italy, especially in the Lombardy region, mainly because it reduces water consumption, and in 2016, this technique was adopted on about 44% of Italian rice fields (Zampieri et al 2019). After sowing, as occurs in the majority of global ricegrowing areas, rice fields are usually continuously flooded throughout the growing season, with intermittent irrigation being a less common practice (Lagomarsino et al 2016).…”

Estimating resilience of crop production systems: From theory to practice

“…However, extreme conditions related to late spring frost ( Barranco et al, 2005 ; Eccel et al, 2009 ; Sweeney et al, 2013 ), heat stress and drought at flowering ( Barnabàs et al, 2007 ; Descamps et al, 2018 ), failure of irrigation systems ( Zampieri et al, 2018b ), spread of pests and pathogens ( Deutsch et al, 2018 ; Lamichhane et al, 2015 ; Savary et al, 2019 ), heavy precipitation or flooding that impede crop and seed development or harvesting activities ( Lesk et al, 2016 ; Shaw et al, 2013 ; Zampieri et al, 2019b ) can result in large production losses.…”

“…These issues motivate the need for a robust and simple method to quantify resilience of agricultural systems. Agricultural resilience and sustainability are generally assessed together in comprehensive frameworks accounting for socio-economic, biophysical, environmental and climatic indicators ( Seekell et al, 2017 ; Zampieri et al, 2019b ). Extensive literature reviews identified 30 relevant agro-ecosystem based sustainability indicators for climate resilient agriculture ( Srinivasa Rao et al, 2018 ) and 15 different tools to assess resilience ( Douxchamps et al, 2017 ).…”

Annual Green Water Resources and Vegetation Resilience Indicators: Definitions, Mutual Relationships, and Future Climate Projections

“…In the future, it would also be interesting to carry on this analysis with an indicator of Blue Water Resources Resilience, which could be easily defined by computing the resilience indicator on the surface water budget given by precipitation minus evapotranspiration. This could be put in relation with soil moisture and river drought through the standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index (SPEI [56,57]) or the Standardized River Discharge Index (SRDI [58,59]) to measure the reliability of freshwater resources for society and to help assessing the status of river ecosystems [60]. This additional resilience indicator may be potentially suitable for river related ecosystem services.…”