Agrivoltaic plants: planning renaturalisation strategies to enhance ecosystem services and protect biodiversity
The transition to renewable energy is crucial to ensuring a sustainable future and ground-mounted Photovoltaic Systems (PV) offer huge potential for reducing net CO₂ emissions. However, ground-mounted solar panels require a significant amount of land, which can lead to conflicts with other land uses, particularly agriculture and biodiversity conservation. The dual-use nature of agrivoltaics (agricultural production between and beneath solar panels) reconciles solar development with biodiversity conservation. In addition, photovoltaic plants should lay the foundations for a more sustainable energy future: an approach we call ‘ecovoltaics’. An agrivoltaic system can be defined as “ecovoltaic,” as it is based on an approach to renewable energy that integrates ecological understanding and principles into the design and management of solar installations. In this context, the research objectives have been to assess and monitor biodiversity and ecosystem services, as well as to develop environmental mitigation and restoration measures in the area planned for a photovoltaic plant in the province of Foggia. Spectral indices were calculated to analyze many aspects related to the naturalness and ecological functioning of the ecosystem under study; about the flow of ecosystem services, the economic coefficients proposed by Costanza et al. (2014) were used as proxies for their assessment across three different spatial scales. Ecological mitigation and renaturalization strategies were identified based on the area’s potential in terms of plant diversity, ecological community complexity, and ecosystem resilience. The restoration project involved introducing plant communities currently found only in the nearby Natura 2000 site “Bosco dell’Incoronata” with plants to be introduced sourced from local ecotypes. The results demonstrated that renaturalization activities will be highly effective in providing ecosystem services on a 2-km scale compared to much larger spatial scales. Furthermore, in the renaturalized areas, vegetation growth will positively influence animal biodiversity, carbon sequestration, soil conservation, and the global water cycle.