The Institute of Mediterranean Agriculture and Forestry (ISAFOM), part of CNR (Italy), focuses on the development and valorization of a sustainable, innovative agri-food system; it was established in 2001 and it has a staff of 89 people. CNR-ISAFOM mission is to investigate biophysical processes in agro-system environments for improving the productivity of agriculture and forests through a sustainable land use. Its skills include the development of tools for water and vegetation resources management, innovation of agro-food and forestry production, effects of the atmosphere and climate change on agricultural and forestry systems.
Temporal and spatial multi-scale crop and soil management is the largest transversal research topic, which includes: (i) the primary production of southern Italy strategic crops in relation with stability and quality of yield, by addressing on the optimization of the resources use and tolerance to abiotic stresses; (ii) traceability of some products (oil, wine); (iii) environmental sustainability of agricultural production; (iv) adaptation of irrigated and rain-fed agriculture to climate change; (v) precision farming based on site-specific characteristics. These topics are often investigated by applying physically-based models of the natural and agricultural systems coupled with advanced numerical techniques of geo-referenced data.
In LANDSUPPORT, CNR-ISAFOM coordinates Work Package 3 on the development of high performance models. CNR-ISAFOM also has a major role in WP2 and WP4, and it support CRISP in project coordination tasks.
