Italian Informative Agricultural System - AGEA (SIAN)

SIAN is the single, integrated information system in use by the various departments or agencies of the Italian Ministry of Agriculture. Services for the Ministry of Agricolture: fisheries, agrometeo, food safety, farmer's aid request control and payments, services to support the Forestry Service and for the development of rural mountain areas, GIS - land management and crop controls. The Geographic Information System plays a role of outmost importance in the process of paying farm subsidies (more then 5.000 mil. euros/year).

Main results, benefits and impacts

Currently it is possible to manage in a single database all the information about the territorial elements, both basic (administrative borders, cadastral maps, digital ortophotos) and specific (agricultural land parcels, agronomics characteristics) of the entire Italian territory. Just to give an idea of the dimension of the database, let's consider that the cadastral parcels amount to 70 millions of geometric elements and the system contains the exact position of over 150 million of olive trees (olive land registry). The GIS-related technologies are used, within the Integrated Administrative and Control System (IACS), to verify the accuracy of farmer's declarations and ensures the highest level of guarantees and simplification both for the producer, supporting the compilation of aid request, and for AGEA in the accomplishment of the procedures for the payments of the premium. This way to proceed with early checks of farmer's requests allowed Italy to obtain from the EU a significant reduction (-50%) of field controls. This activity led to the creation of a centralised Geographic Information System (GIS) for managing all the graphic data, integrated with the information systems for managing data concerning aid applications from the different sectors (olive, vineyards, arable lands, etc.), whose content includes: - 300.000 Cadastral Maps (average area: 1 km2) - 70.000.000 Cadastral Parcels (average area: 4.300 m2) - Geographical identification of olive trees (about 170.000.000 trees) - Geographical identification and geometry of vineyards (about 3.000.000 vineyards) - Geographical identification and geometry of arable-land plots (about 7.000.000 ha) - >15.000 digital ortophotos of approx. 45 km2 each with ground resolution of 1 m2 The creation of a GIS has at present made available to controller and decision makers: - a fully digital database, accessible by personal computer; - a "continuous" land database, i.e. without the restrictions associated with access "by portions" (generally corresponding to cadastral maps); - the possibility to query the geographical database from any remote workstation (PC) connected to the GIS on a nation-wide basis; - the complete accessibility to graphical land data, both in inquiry and in update, by all peripheral bodies authorised to process applications for aid (Regional Administration, Oil Associations, Wine Co-operatives, Professional Organisations, etc.)

Return on investment

Return on investment: Not applicable / Not available

Lessons learnt

The experiences developed building the AGEA GIS and the availability of the huge geographic information basis described above led to the development, on behalf of the Italian Ministry for Agriculture and Forestry, of the Italian Mountain Information System (SIM), whose primary users are the Italian Mountain Communities, the Ministry of Environment, the Regions and the National Parks Authorities, for a total of amount over 700 different institutions.