Author(s): A. Cinzia Taglioretti

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Keywords: Irrigation consortium; Territorial information system; Data management; Po Valley; Hydraulic reclamation

Abstract: A Ph.D. in an Irrigation and Reclamation Consortium: the beginning of a new approach to the data management, a new methodology in the study of the territory and a wider vision of the consortium problems. The Associazione Irrigazione Est Sesia was founded in 1926 and over the last year it became a Consortium of Irrigation and Hydraulic Reclamation, with the juridical nature of private consortium of public interest. The aim of Est Sesia is the management of irrigation, soil protection, protection of water resources and enhancement of the rural space and time of its district, which extends over 330,000 hectares, straddling two Italian regions: Piedmont and Lombardy. Given its great extension and its inter-regionality, it stands out in the Italian landscape as one of the major existing consortia and represents the complex and delicate irrigation system of the paddy fields of the Po Valley. One of the most critical daily issues of consortium is exactly due to its intrinsic nature: the reason for which the Association was founded is the will to guarantee the sufficient quantity of water for the cultures irrigation even in case of poorness of water resources. This consists not only in the fair distribution of water in an extremely wide and diverse territory, but also in the maintenance (in efficiency and security) of the underlying network of channels and ditches that reaches an extension of about 10,000 km. The management of the territory therefore has fundamental importance, always keeping in mind all the different aspects that characterize it: the consortium ranging from plain areas to river valleys and 1,000 meters of elevation. Consequently, it has been essential to provide the Association with structured and usable databases so as to be the detailed knowledge base of the various consortium entities and to allow it to be used by the consortium's workers, i.e. to designers, office clerks, campaign staff. In order to guarantee this knowledge, during my PhD I started to organize a database that arises from the digitization of a large number of cartographic documents of the Association and from the result of surveys conducted in the field over several years, which allows a precise view of the territory and it represents a very useful tool for the personnel involved in the design of the works. By exploiting this database, which generated a Territorial Information System (hereafter SIT), therefore it is possible to identify constraints (environmental and non-environmental), interconnections with infrastructures (roads, railways, urban centers, etc.), the problems and criticalities that involve the Association’s canals network. In addition, the same SIT is also used by the Zone Offices that interfaces daily with the public to interrogate the territory at the cadastral particle level. This SIT makes possible to study a specific area both from a geometric point of view and both from

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3850/978-981-11-2731-1_083-cd

Year: 2018