Wateruse and urban agriculture: estimation and water saving scenarios for residential kitchen gardens

摘要

During the last years, in the city of Rome (Italy) due to social and economical trends urban agriculture is a growin phenomenon. Residential kitchen gardens in Rome are a custom started in the past, but recently they experienced strong increase with aconcentration in the city fringe. The amount and extension of these cultivated parcels ha been inventoried by the Italian Institute of Agricultural Economics (INEA) in 2014 with a methodology based o photointerpretation of the very high resolution imagery provided by Google Earth. The spatial dataset, after fie! validation, contains around 2,700 polygons with some attributes, among which the agricultural land use (i.e horticulture, mixed crops, orchards, vineyards and olive groves). The use of water inurban agriculture is a relevan issue both in terms of competition with other uses and in terms of safety for human health. In Rome, residentia kitchen gardens may resort to municipal water supply but, due to water costs, the water abstraction from wells(lega and illegal) and canals and rivers (illegal) is common. This paper describes the estimation of the irrigation wate demand of the residential kitchen gardens by taking into account various agricultural land use and two differen irrigation systems.Estimations are referred to the irrigation season (April-September) by using average climatic dat; (1950-2000). Parcels irrigation water requirement is also evaluated in terms of sustainability by considering ; scenario where rain water is harvested andstored for the irrigation season as a possible alternative or supplement tc the current irrigation sources. The proposed approach could be useful for administrators for a preliminar; assessment of one of the component of water use in urban areas, and tosupport water management activities b; taking into account the beneficial role of urban agriculture.