The Apulian Tavoliere

This area is a plain in northern Apulia, southern Italy, occupying nearly a half of the Capitanata traditional region. It covers a surface of c. 3,000 km², once constituting a sea bottom: it is bounded by the Daunian Pre-Apennines on the West, the Gargano Promontory and the Adriatic Sea on the East, by the Fortore river on the north, and the Ofanto river on the south. It is the largest Italian plain after the Pianura Padana. The name Tavoliere derives from the Medieval Latin term Tabularium, a table on which Transumanza officials classified the areas devoted to sheep farming. In winter the plain is sometimes subject to floods by the Ofanto and the Fortore, while in summer drought is frequent.

In this area we attested and maintain a pair of networks of monitoring sensors for soil moisture measurments along and other environmental parameters.