Towards an understanding of the hydrological processes of greenhouse horticulture districts
- 1University of Padua, Department of civil, environmental and architectural engineering, Padova, Italy (daniele.lacecilia@unipd.it)
- 2CREA Research Centre for Vegetable and Ornamental Crops, Council for Agricultural Research and Economics, Via dei Cavalleggeri 51, 84098 Pontecagnano, SA, Italy.
- 3Consorzio di Bonifica in Destra del Fiume Sele, Cioffi, 84025, SA, Italy.
The occurrence of agricultural catchments covered by plastic greenhouses is growing worldwide. Horticultural greenhouse production allows for saving irrigation water at the farm scale, but also alters the natural hydrological cycle. Currently, these alterations are not accounted for in physics-based hydrological models. In this study, we aim to couple the greenhouse climate model KASPRO1, to estimate indoor crop transpiration from outdoor meteorological variables, with the integrated surface-subsurface hydrological model CATchment HYdrology (CATHY2) to simulate the stream discharge as well as the shallow groundwater depth in an agricultural catchment (11 km2) covered by plastic greenhouses in South Italy. The dynamic presence of greenhouses, along with bare soils and vegetated lands, is mapped with the Open field and Protected Agriculture land cover Classifier (OPAC3).
We first compare our simulations against indoor measurements of water use (drip- and sub-irrigation) and soil moisture dynamics at different depths at the plot scale. Next, we run CATHY at the catchment scale and compare the output against measured stream water level.
The aim of our study is to validate the capabilities of KASPRO and CATHY to provide high-fidelity spatially distributed dynamic simulations of evapotranspiration and irrigation fluxes, as well as soil moisture and groundwater flows. Such capabilities are essentials to understand the implications of plastic greenhouse districts on the hydrological cycle and thus making these models useful tools for a more sustainable management of agricultural catchments.
References
1 De Zwart, H.F., 1996. Analyzing Energy-Saving Options in Greenhouse Cultivation Using a Simulation Model. Landbouwuniversiteit, Wageningen.
2 Camporese, M., Paniconi, C., Putti, M., & Orlandini, S. (2010). Surface--subsurface flow modeling with path-based runoff routing, boundary condition-based coupling, and assimilation of multisource observation data. Water Resources Research, 46, W02512.
3 la Cecilia, D., Tom, M., Stamm, C., Odermatt, D., 2023. Pixel-based mapping of open field and protected agriculture using constrained Sentinel-2 data. ISPRS Open Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing 8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ophoto.2023.100033.
Acknowledgements: We thank the Consorzio di Bonifica in Destra del Fiume Sele for the continuous support in the MSCA-PF REWATERING project.
Funding: This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101062255
How to cite: la Cecilia, D., Venezia, A., Maino, D., and Camporese, M.: Towards an understanding of the hydrological processes of greenhouse horticulture districts, EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-9140, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-9140, 2024.
