Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

New technologies could be adequately introduced for an improved analysis aimed to the sustainable management and planning of the rural land, as well as its environment and landscape. Nowadays, this analysis is easier and more complete through the use of powerful and reliable tools. Several changes can be considered to be as models of territorial development, useful for an appropriate planning of the human interventions in a rural area. Remote sensing techniques could be employed for the monitoring of agricultural land variation, while Geographical Information Systems are excellent tools for landscape modeling and three-dimensional analysis. In this chapter, land-use changes in a rural area located in southern Italy were analyzed by comparing some historical cartographic supports with modern maps, in order to evaluate the morphological and vegetation variations of the agroforestry land during time. Moreover, a landscape analysis was conducted through the implementation of digital terrain models, which were enriched by draping land cover pictures over them. These elaborations finally enabled an evaluation in a scenic way of the aesthetic quality of the agroforestry landscape, allowing a virtual jump back to time periods when digital aerial photography was not yet even possible. This multi-temporal analysis with the support of GIS techniques revealed to have a great potential for assessing and managing landscape diversity and changes of vegetation, as well as for planning sound interventions over the landscape structures.

The growing demand of fresh fruit and vegetable, free of pathogens and chemical residues, requires the application of safe and sustainable technologies for extending the storage life of these products. Furthermore, a very interesting and profitable activity is the isolation/extraction of pure natural (herbal) components that could be used by food, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic companies. In this context, several technologies have been developed in order to preserve fruits and vegetables during postharvest, also by using biocontrol agents, natural antimicrobials, GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) agents and physical treatments, and to recover valuable compounds as essential oil (from leaf, skin, pulp, or seed) using the most appropriate technology (extraction, distillation, or drying). In this chapter, authors, focusing on some of Mediterranean basin productions that are components of the Mediterranean diet, describe the main sustainable and innovative technologies and the related plants, suitable for management of fruits and vegetables postharvest and for recovery of essential oils from plant materials.

The sustainable management of human activities, from production to waste disposal and the cycling of finite resources, is one of the great challenges of research for the coming decades, stemming from societal needs and the growing awareness of environmental mechanisms.

Research on geophysical methods provides an interdisciplinary approach to such challenges by addressing the need for techniques to assist in designing and monitoring strategies for sustainability in agriculture and other environment-related sciences.

In the past few decades, technological advances have produced new tools or have improved existing techniques for near-surface geophysical investigation in a robust, cost-effective, and noninvasive way. Experimental results have proved that soil physical properties thus detected and mapped can be used as a proxy of physical, chemical, and biological features relevant for the appropriate management of soils, based on their behavior, spatial variability, and time dynamics.

This chapter reviews principles of the techniques and reports selected research results on environmental and agronomic research.

Precision farming is a form of multidisciplinary and technologically advanced agriculture, which recourses to machines equipped with “intelligent systems,” able to dose the productive factors (fertilizers, pesticides, etc.) according to the real needs of the homogeneous areas constituent to the plot (Verhagen and Bouma, Modeling soil variability. In: Pierce FJ, Sadler EJ (eds) The state of site specific management for agriculture. ASA Publications, 1997).

Experimental trials have been conducted in order to compare two satellite-guidance devices and two correction systems of the GPS signal: the EZ-Steer/RTK and Autopilot/EGNOS. The machines used in the tests were the tractor New Holland T7060, the rotary harrow Alpego DG-400, and the burier Forigo DG-45, to determine which of the two systems ensured the best quality of work. The results obtained showed that the EZ-Steer/RTK system guaranteed a lower stability of the theoretical trajectory than the Autopilot/EGNOS system, above 1.69 %. From the elaboration of data of the two guidance systems behavior to manage the only width of transposition, it is observed that the EZ-Steer/RTK system is able to guarantee a better hold of the line compared to the Autopilot/EGNOS system, which provides a mistake of 176 cm on the total width of transposition and 2 cm on the mean value. In the matter of the normalized transposition surfaces, the Autopilot/EGNOS system ensures a better work quality.

Food safety is a priority for the food industry and to achieve this result a correct plant sanitation programme is of the utmost importance. Among various disinfection techniques, an emerging one is represented by the use of electrolysed water (EW) as the disinfecting agent. The use of EW is compliant with the desire to find alternatives to chlorination and heat treatments, representing a green cleaning alternative to toxic disinfectants. EW is an activated liquid, obtained by passing a diluted saline solution (NaCl, KCl or MgCl) through an electrolytic cell, thus causing the production from the anode side of electrolysed oxidising water, containing high dissolved oxygen, free chlorine and characterised by a low pH (2.3–2.7) and a high oxidation–reduction potential (ORP > 1,000 mV). At the same time from the cathode side electrolysed reduced water is produced, with high pH (10.0–11.5), high dissolved hydrogen and low ORP (−800 to −900 mV). Unlike other chemical disinfectants, EW is not harmful for skin and mucous membranes and is quite easy to handle. Furthermore, the use of EW is relatively inexpensive and, above all, is a sustainable technique. Currently used sanitisers (e.g. glutaraldehyde, formaldehyde, etc.) are effective, but their adverse effects on the environment are well known. Differently from these chemicals, the use of EW has a reduced impact on the environment and because of its properties, it may find several applications in the food industry. In this work, the characteristics and some EW applications as sustainable sanitation technique applied in the food industry are reported and discussed.