Statistics and Computational Methods Seminar Series - Fall 2025

Titolo: SCARFACE: integrating socio-economic, environmental and agricultural spatio-temporal data for multi-purpose studies

Autori: Paolo Maranzano (Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca & Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei)

Abstract

We present the "Sequestering CARbon through Forests, AgriCulture, and land usE (SCARFACE)" research initiative. Through the use of advanced geostatistical learning and data science techniques, SCARFACE studies the spatio-temporal evolution of agricultural land use and carbon sequestration practices in the Po Valley, a region characterized by intensive livestock farming and agricultural land use and with very low air quality standards. The ground floor of the project concerns the harmonization a large set of georeferenced databases with different temporal frequencies (e.g., from hourly to yearly measurement) with uneven spatial coverages and resolutions (e.g., point, areal and gridded satellite data). In particular, we considered open source and institutional databases on livestock farming, soil use and composition, weather, climate and airborne pollutants related to agricultural activities (in particular ammonia and particulate matters) augmented by farm-level data on the structure of agricultural holdings (including their techno-productive practices related to carbon sequestration) provided by CREA-PB. According to the type of variable and the available time range we adopted a specific harmonization strategy. The resulting harmonized dataset comprises hundreds of multi-type spatial-and-temporal-varying variables (e.g., continuous and qualitative variables) for the 254 agrarian subregions (ASRs) in the Po Valley with yearly frequency from 2011 to 2023. The SCARFACE database allows for multi-purpose empirical analysis, including policy evaluation and spatio-temporal analysis regarding the Italian agricultural industry. The dataset is open source and freely available in a dedicated GitHub repository.

Links: https://github.com/ScarfaceSeqCARForAgriCultLandusE ;  https://www.paolomaranzano.net/scarface

The seminar will be held in presence, but streaming will also be available at: 

UniBG Seminars - Paolo Maranzano | Partecipazione alla riunione | Microsoft Teams