Animal Welfare and land suitability for farming

Climate change strongly influences pastoral systems, in particular of the Alpine valleys, leading to questioning about future forecast scenarios with respect to the availability of forage in the mountain pastures. Their survival has not only an ecological but also an economic value, since it allows the mountain territory and its populations to preserve their resilience and prevent the abandonment of garrison, management and production activities, making it increasingly urgent to achieve a balance between the resources available and their exploitation.
In the context of Animal Welfare and land suitability for farming, in order to define the correlation between the climate and the reduction of forage availability net of anthropogenic influences, we intend to detect the characteristic flora of the area of ​​interest and, through the application of specific ecological indices, to evaluate the value indices of the pasture, in a temporal comparison of about twenty years. A service will be developed that exploits these data and medium-term forecasts, in order to provide breeders, technicians, land managers and public administrations with information useful for managing situations of extreme climatic events, which can put systemic activity at risk, connected to the agricultural garrison of the mountain.