Unlocking New Opportunities for Spatial Analysis of Farms’ Income and Business Activities in Italy: The Agricultural Regions in Shapefile Format

Italy is divided into 773 Agricultural Regions (ARs) based on shared physical and agronomic characteristics. These regions offer a valuable tool for analyzing various geographical, socio-economic, and environmental aspects of agriculture, including the climate. However, the ARs have lacked geospatial data, limiting their analytical potential. This study introduces the “Italian ARs Dataset”, a georeferenced shapefile defining the boundaries of each AR. This dataset facilitates geographical assessments of Italy’s complex agricultural sector. It also unlocks the potential for integrating AR data with other datasets like the Farm Accounting Data Network (FADN) dataset, in Italy represented by the Rete di Informazione Contabile Agricola (RICA), which samples hundreds of thousands of farms annually. To demonstrate the dataset’s utility, a large sample of RICA data encompassing 179 irrigated crops from 2011 to 2021, covering all of Italy, was retrieved. Validation confirmed successful assignment of all ARs present in the RICA sample to the corresponding shapefile. Additionally, to encourage the use of the ARs Dataset with gridded data, different spatial-scale resolutions are tested to identify a suitable threshold. The minimal spatial scale identified is 0.11 degrees, a commonly adopted scale by several climate datasets within the EURO-CORDEX and COPERNICUS programs.