Multidimensional analysis of environmental impacts from potato agricultural production in the Peruvian Central Andes.

Rain-fed potato systems, being the most important cash crop in the Peruvian Central Andes, play a key role in food security. Quantifying the environmental impacts and understanding their complex interactions is an important step towards an improvement of the technical sustainability of these systems. From 2005 until 2015, 58 potato field plots located on a transect of Mantaro Valley, Junín, Peru were investigated at field level during the rainy cropping seasons. All external inputs used for crop production were measured and registered on fortnightly basis. A life cycle assessment (LCA) was performed (per ton yield fresh weight) to assess the most important potential environmental impact categories (EICs). Due to the intrinsic variability of the production systems, a cluster analysis (k-means algorithm) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) were implemented to group and evaluate the classification based on the EICs values. Furthermore, latent variables were obtained using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to investigate the correlational structure of main biophysical inputs (kg ha

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