Diversified rotations in protected vegetable production systems including cover crops

Problem

In protected vegetable systems of the Mediterranean area, cover crops can offer different ecosystem services. However, in practice, their inclusion in rotations is limited because the land use is primarily driven by profitability objectives.

Solution

Based on the ROTAT+ modelling tool (Dogliotti et al. 2003), several rotations including cover crops were generated and have been subject to a procedure of multi-objectives optimisation and assessment.