A new methodological study to allocate energy crops at different scale levels: a multidirectional approach

Generally, the land allocation scenarios for biomass crops are based on crop requirements and environmental characteristics, mostly including climate and soil variables, whereas the backward crop effect on the same environment have been poorly considered or totally ignored. Nonetheless, despite the crop performance can be considerable under specific conditions, the environmental vulnerability to a crop-specific impact could lead to negative consequences. A crop could be in fact well adapted to a given environment in term of productivity, yet it could be highly risky for that environment, e.g. in the case of proximity of a river or a lake with crops having high leaching rates. It follows that the high potential productivity is not sufficient to establish the environmental suitability of a crop. LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) defines several indicators of the environmental impacts which could be used to classify the risk associated to a crop under specific conditions. Therefore, in the present article GIS maps on soil vulnerability to certain crop impacts (eutrophication) for a case study area were presented with the aim at identifying an LCA-GIS integrated method for decision support systems and illustrate the outlines of a bidirectional environment-to-crop oriented procedure.