New map of the best fruit-growing areas in Catalonia.

The UAB has taken part in the Fruitmap project, the first of its kind in Europe, which marks out for the first time the country's best fruit-growing areas.

20/02/2013

Fruitmap was created jointly by the Catalan Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries, Food, and the Natural Environment - through its Institute of Agri-food Research and Technology (IRTA) - and AFRUCAT (Association of Catalan Fruit Businesses), in response to the need of fruit companies for accurate and reliable information when taking important decisions like what to plant and where, in the context of change, investment and modernisation that the sector is going through.

The project team included specialists in climate, agronomy and soil, among them the UAB research group GRUMETS (Research Group on Methods and Applications in Teledetection and Geographical Information Systems). They have produced a useful instrument for planning future fruit-growing in Catalonia: a set of suitability maps that classify the country's regions based on their suitability for producing sweet fruits in optimal conditions, in terms of quality, quantity and sustainability.

The project's starting-points were the characteristics of the main fruit varieties grown in Catalonia, the Digital Climate Atlas of Catalonia and the Map of Soils of Catalonia. From here it goes on to create and combine a set of agro-climatic and edaphic variables that are then used to classify the regions.