Crop Residue Management as a Strategy of Adaptation and Mitigation to Climate Change

This paper reports the first results of a research developed in the context of the three-years (2013-16) research project “IC-FAR - Linking long term observatories with crop system modelling for better understanding of climate change impact and adaptation strategies for Italian cropping systems” (www.icfar.it).The goals are : i) to parameterize crop models considering two Long TermAgro-Ecosystem experiments (LTAE) located in experimental farms of Foggia (FG) and Papiano, Perugia (PG), in Southern and Central Italy, respectively and ii) to evaluate the crop residue (CR) management as a strategy of adaptation and/or mitigation to climate change forecasted for the reference areas of the LTEs in study. Climate scenarios were generated by setting up a statistical model using predictors from ERA40 reanalysis and seasonal indices of temperature and precipitation from E-OBS gridded data for the period 1958-2010. The statistical downscaling model was applied to CMCC-CM predictors to obtain climate projections at local scale over the period 1971-2000 and 2021-2050 (RCP4.5 and RCP8.5 emission scenarios)