ITALIAN PRUNING BIOMASS PRODUCTION IN RELATION TO ORCHARD CHARACTERISTICS

This aim of this work, carried out in the framework of the EuroPruning Project ("Development and implementation of a new and non existent logistics chain for biomass from pruning"), co-financed by the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme, has been to achieve improvements for the assessment of woody biomass obtained during execution of agricultural prunings in Italy. Pruning operations are carried out regularly in vineyard, olive groves and fruit tree plantations. Several works propose biomass production rates (t/ha) for the pruning wood in the estimation of regional potentials. These rates are subject of very high variability due to the influence of several aspects. On the one hand aspects directly linked to the crop characteristics, such as specie, variety and age, and, on the other hand to the crop management, often associated to local habits and conditions, such as tree form, planting pattern and density, pruning methods, irrigation, climate, etc. The present works has carried out a data collection from through surveying ad literature review. The sub-set of Italian records in the EuroPruning database contains 70 records. Each record includes the biomass production rate measured and 8 agronomic variables. Additionally a set of 6 climatic and agro-climatic groups of variables (adding 28 variables) have been added to each record. A statistical analysis has yield moderate to good correlations specially with few climatic factors. As result two regression models are proposed for the evaluation of the vineyard pruning biomass production rates for Italy.