Multi-scaling Agroclimatic Classification for Decision Support Towards Sustainable Production

Abstract

Agriculture is highly affected by environmental conditions and the assessment of the agroclimatic potential is necessary for sustainability and productivity. The climate is among the most important factors that determine the agricultural potentialities of a region and the suitability of a region for a specific crop, whereas the yield is determined by weather conditions. In this chapter the first objective is to identify sustainable production zones in Thessaly by conducting contemporary agroclimatic classification based on remote sensing and GIS. The agroclimatic conditions of agricultural areas have to be assessed in order to achieve sustainable and efficient use of natural resources in combination with production optimization. Thus, a quantitative understanding of the climate of a region is essential for developing improved farming systems. The second objective derives from the first; it develops a decision support system (DSS) by using multi-criteria analysis combining different criteria to a utility function under a set of constraints concerning different categories of agroclimatic, social, cultural and economic conditions and so we can achieve an optimum agricultural production plan. In order to support the realization of the proposed production zoning and DSS in real-time, a Sensor Web service platform is proposed to be implemented based on the Sensor Web technologies, which extracts Real-time environmental and agronomic data.