Agronomical zoning in the municipal urban plan and viticultural predisposition

Abstract

The analysis of agricultural spaces is usually defined by disciplines and by the agronomic profession of which, in the municipal urbanistic tools, the result of its in-depth analysis is almost never recognized (at least in Italy), neither as a resolute factor that impedes the waste of soil for urbanization purposes nor as a selective support of agricultural/productive zoning. Furthermore, in contemporary times, the fine-tuning of Geographical Information Systems technologies is so advanced that it permits the full understanding of the physical interdependencies. These interdependences are useful in the evaluation of the agronomy of a territory within the municipal plan, adopting, through the most advanced analytical boundaries of the GIS applications, the multivariate geostatistical analyses both for the calculation of the correlations between the numerous environmental, landscape, and territorial components as well as for the elimination of the subjectivity of the attitudinal judgment attributed by the analyst to different indicators.In such cases, especially in the judgment of viticultural behaviors, there is a delicate built equilibrium in the relationship between the physical resources (soil, air, water) and the productive profile most suitable. For this reason, in the case study the available information is translated from the continuous dimension to the discrete, contriving a matrix where each homogeneous, static pixel corresponds to a spatial cell, finalized at the simultaneous comparison of all of the parameters necessary to evaluate the viticultural discipline and the consequential multivariate analysis from which emerge the basins of different behavioral levels. The successful result of this application thereby allows for critique of the all too mechanical modality of Overlay utilized by Boyer (1998) like the multi-criteria approach followed by territorial analysts such as Malczewski (2004), Riveira (2006), Jones (2004), Tomasi (2013) retaining multivariate analyses to be more lucrative in the resolution of the problem. Such multivariate analyses include the analysis of the correlations and principal components together with the final cluster analysis, which allow the groupings of variability of intensity to be extracted, evaluating them by the interdependence between them. In this way, a calculation of viticultural behavior is constructed that presents a procedure characterized by superior reliability in comparison to the most diffused hierarchical multi-criteria classification. It is therefore able to eliminate whatever arbitrary, discretional, and hierarchical attribution of judgments (and consequential points) to the single descriptive parameters of physical resources, able to further amplify by a great deal the entity and quality of the variables adopted in the calculation, and, in the end, able to pour the results of the geostatistical results into the corresponding cells of the Agronomical Zoning in the Municipal Urban Plan and Viticultural Predisposition 21 analyzed space and in the subsequent trajectory cartography of the municipal urban plan. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.