Winter wheat yield prediction using convolutional neural networks from environmental and phenological data

Seasonal Maize yield forecasting in South and East African Countries using hybrid Earth observation models

Climate change still adversely affects agriculture in the sub-Saharan Africa. There is need to strengthen early action to bolster livelihoods and food security. Most governments use pre- and post-harvest field surveys to capture statistics for National Food Balance Sheets (NFBS) key in food policy and economic planning. These surveys, though accurate, are costly, time consuming, and may not offer rapid yield estimates to support governments, emergency organizations, and related stakeholders to take advanced strategic decisions in the face of climate change. To help governments in Kenya (KEN), Zambia (ZMB), and Malawi (MWI) adopt digitally advanced maize yield forecasts, we developed a hybrid model based on the Regional Hydrologic Extremes Assessment System (RHEAS) and machine learning. The framework is set-up to use weather data (precipitation, temperature, and wind), simulations from RHEAS model (soil total moisture, soil temperature, solar radiation, surface temperature, net transpiration from vegetation, net evapotranspiration, and root zone soil moisture), simulations from DSSAT (leaf area index and water stress), and MODIS vegetation indices. Random Forest (RF) machine learning model emerged as the best hybrid setup for unit maize yield forecasts per administrative boundary scoring the lowest unbiased Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 0.16 MT/ha, 0.18 MT/ha, and 0.20 MT/ha in Malawi's Karonga district, Kenya's Homa Bay county, and Zambia's Senanga district respectively. According to relative RMSE, RF outperformed other hybrid models attaining the lowest score in all countries (ZMB: 25.96%, MWI: 28.97%, and KEN: 27.54%) followed by support vector machines (ZMB: 26.92%, MWI: 31.14%, and KEN: 29.50%), and linear regression (ZMB: 29.44%, MWI: 31.76%, and KEN: 47.00%). Lastly, the integration of VI and RHEAS information using hybrid models improved yield prediction. This information is useful for NFBS bulletins forecasts, design and certification of maize insurance contracts, and estimation of loss and damage in the advent of climate justice.

Effects of wind speed and wind direction on crop yield forecasting using dynamic time warping and an ensembled learning model

The cultivation of cashew crops carries numerous economic advantages, and countries worldwide that produce this crop face a high demand. The effects of wind speed and wind direction on crop yield prediction using proficient deep learning algorithms are less emphasized or researched. We propose a combination of advanced deep learning techniques, specifically focusing on long short-term memory (LSTM) and random forest models. We intend to enhance this ensemble model using dynamic time warping (DTW) to assess the spatiotemporal data (wind speed and wind direction) similarities within Jaman North, Jaman South, and Wenchi with their respective production yield. In the Bono region of Ghana, these three areas are crucial for cashew production. The LSTM-DTW-RF model with wind speed and wind direction achieved an R2 score of 0.847 and the LSTM-RF model without these two key features R2 score of (0.74). Both models were evaluated using the augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) test, which is commonly used in time series analysis to assess stationarity, where the LSTM-DTW-RF achieved a 90% level of confidence, while LSTM-RF attained an 87.99% level. Among the three municipalities, Jaman South had the highest evaluation scores for the model, with an RMSE of 0.883, an R2 of 0.835, and an MBE of 0.212 when comparing actual and predicted values for Wenchi. In terms of the annual average wind direction, Jaman North recorded (270.5 SW°), Jaman South recorded (274.8 SW°), and Wenchi recorded (272.6 SW°). The DTW similarity distance for the annual average wind speed across these regions fell within specific ranges: Jaman North (±25.72), Jaman South (±25.89), and Wenchi (±26.04). Following the DTW similarity evaluation, Jaman North demonstrated superior performance in wind speed, while Wenchi excelled in wind direction. This underscores the potential efficiency of DTW when incorporated into the analysis of environmental factors affecting crop yields, given its invariant nature. The results obtained can guide further exploration of DTW variations in combination with other machine learning models to predict higher cashew yields. Additionally, these findings emphasize the significance of wind speed and direction in vertical farming, contributing to informed decisions for sustainable agricultural growth and development.

Unleashing the Potential of Digitalization in the Agri-Food Chain for Integrated Food Systems

Digitalization transforms many industries, especially manufacturing, with new concepts such as Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things. However, information technology also has the potential to integrate and connect the various steps in the supply chain. For the food industry, the situation is ambivalent: It has a high level of automatization, but the potential of digitalization is so far not used today. In this review, we discuss current trends in information technology that have the potential to transform the food industry into an integrated food system. We show how this digital transformation can integrate various activities within the agri-food chain and support the idea of integrated food systems. Based on a future-use case, we derive the potential of digitalization to tackle future challenges in the food industry and present a research agenda.

Reviewing the essential roles of remote phenotyping, GWAS and explainable AI in practical marker-assisted selection for drought-tolerant winter wheat breeding

Marker-assisted selection (MAS) plays a crucial role in crop breeding improving the speed and precision of conventional breeding programmes by quickly and reliably identifying and selecting plants with desired traits. However, the efficacy of MAS depends on several prerequisites, with precise phenotyping being a key aspect of any plant breeding programme. Recent advancements in high-throughput remote phenotyping, facilitated by unmanned aerial vehicles coupled to machine learning, offer a non-destructive and efficient alternative to traditional, time-consuming, and labour-intensive methods. Furthermore, MAS relies on knowledge of marker-trait associations, commonly obtained through genome-wide association studies (GWAS), to understand complex traits such as drought tolerance, including yield components and phenology. However, GWAS has limitations that artificial intelligence (AI) has been shown to partially overcome. Additionally, AI and its explainable variants, which ensure transparency and interpretability, are increasingly being used as recognised problem-solving tools throughout the breeding process. Given these rapid technological advancements, this review provides an overview of state-of-the-art methods and processes underlying each MAS, from phenotyping, genotyping and association analyses to the integration of explainable AI along the entire workflow. In this context, we specifically address the challenges and importance of breeding winter wheat for greater drought tolerance with stable yields, as regional droughts during critical developmental stages pose a threat to winter wheat production. Finally, we explore the transition from scientific progress to practical implementation and discuss ways to bridge the gap between cutting-edge developments and breeders, expediting MAS-based winter wheat breeding for drought tolerance.

An intelligent agriculture management system for rainfall prediction and fruit health monitoring

Contrary to popular belief, agriculture is becoming more data-driven with artificial intelligence and Internet-of-Things (IoT) playing crucial roles. In this paper, the integrated processing executed by various sensors combined as an IoT pack and driving an intelligent agriculture management system designed for rainfall prediction and fruit health monitoring have been included. The proposed system based on an AI aided model makes use of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with long short-term memory (LSTM) layer for rainfall prediction and a CNN with SoftMax layer along with a few deep learning pre-trained models for fruit health monitoring. Another model that works as a combined rainfall predictor and fruit health recognizer is designed using a CNN + LSTM and a multi-head self-attention mechanism which proves to be effective. The entire system is cloud resident and available for use through an application.

Is deeper always better? Evaluating deep learning models for yield forecasting with small data

Predicting crop yields, and especially anomalously low yields, is of special importance for food insecure countries. In this study, we investigate a flexible deep learning approach to forecast crop yield at the provincial administrative level based on deep 1D and 2D convolutional neural networks using limited data. This approach meets the operational requirements-public and global records of satellite data in an application ready format with near real time updates-and can be transferred to any country with reliable yield statistics. Three-dimensional histograms of normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and climate data are used as input to the 2D model, while simple administrative-level time series averages of NDVI and climate data to the 1D model. The best model architecture is automatically identified during efficient and extensive hyperparameter optimization. To demonstrate the relevance of this approach, we hindcast (2002-2018) the yields of Algeria's three main crops (barley, durum and soft wheat) and contrast the model's performance with machine learning algorithms and conventional benchmark models used in a previous study. Simple benchmarks such as peak NDVI remained challenging to outperform while machine learning models were superior to deep learning models for all forecasting months and all tested crops. We attribute the poor performance of deep learning to the small size of the dataset available.

NEAL: an open-source tool for audio annotation

Passive acoustic monitoring is used widely in ecology, biodiversity, and conservation studies. Data sets collected via acoustic monitoring are often extremely large and built to be processed automatically using artificial intelligence and machine learning models, which aim to replicate the work of domain experts. These models, being supervised learning algorithms, need to be trained on high quality annotations produced by experts. Since the experts are often resource-limited, a cost-effective process for annotating audio is needed to get maximal use out of the data. We present an open-source interactive audio data annotation tool, NEAL (Nature+Energy Audio Labeller). Built using R and the associated Shiny framework, the tool provides a reactive environment where users can quickly annotate audio files and adjust settings that automatically change the corresponding elements of the user interface. The app has been designed with the goal of having both expert birders and citizen scientists contribute to acoustic annotation projects. The popularity and flexibility of R programming in bioacoustics means that the Shiny app can be modified for other bird labelling data sets, or even to generic audio labelling tasks. We demonstrate the app by labelling data collected from wind farm sites across Ireland.

Evaluation of Three Feature Dimension Reduction Techniques for Machine Learning-Based Crop Yield Prediction Models

Machine learning (ML) has been widely used worldwide to develop crop yield forecasting models. However, it is still challenging to identify the most critical features from a dataset. Although either feature selection (FS) or feature extraction (FX) techniques have been employed, no research compares their performances and, more importantly, the benefits of combining both methods. Therefore, this paper proposes a framework that uses non-feature reduction (All-F) as a baseline to investigate the performance of FS, FX, and a combination of both (FSX). The case study employs the vegetation condition index (VCI)/temperature condition index (TCI) to develop 21 rice yield forecasting models for eight sub-regions in Vietnam based on ML methods, namely linear, support vector machine (SVM), decision tree (Tree), artificial neural network (ANN), and Ensemble. The results reveal that FSX takes full advantage of the FS and FX, leading FSX-based models to perform the best in 18 out of 21 models, while 2 (1) for FS-based (FX-based) models. These FXS-, FS-, and FX-based models improve All-F-based models at an average level of 21% and up to 60% in terms of RMSE. Furthermore, 21 of the best models are developed based on Ensemble (13 models), Tree (6 models), linear (1 model), and ANN (1 model). These findings highlight the significant role of FS, FX, and specially FSX coupled with a wide range of ML algorithms (especially Ensemble) for enhancing the accuracy of predicting crop yield.

A Cloud Enabled Crop Recommendation Platform for Machine Learning-Driven Precision Farming

Modern agriculture incorporated a portfolio of technologies to meet the current demand for agricultural food production, in terms of both quality and quantity. In this technology-driven farming era, this portfolio of technologies has aided farmers to overcome many of the challenges associated with their farming activities by enabling precise and timely decision making on the basis of data that are observed and subsequently converged. In this regard, Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds a key place, whereby it can assist key stakeholders in making precise decisions regarding the conditions on their farms. Machine Learning (ML), which is a branch of AI, enables systems to learn and improve from their experience without explicitly being programmed, by imitating intelligent behavior in solving tasks in a manner that requires low computational power. For the time being, ML is involved in a variety of aspects of farming, assisting ranchers in making smarter decisions on the basis of the observed data. In this study, we provide an overview of AI-driven precision farming/agriculture with related work and then propose a novel cloud-based ML-powered crop recommendation platform to assist farmers in deciding which crops need to be harvested based on a variety of known parameters. Moreover, in this paper, we compare five predictive ML algorithms-K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) and Support Vector Machine (SVM)-to identify the best-performing ML algorithm on which to build our recommendation platform as a cloud-based service with the intention of offering precision farming solutions that are free and open source, as will lead to the growth and adoption of precision farming solutions in the long run.

A Review of an Artificial Intelligence Framework for Identifying the Most Effective Palm Oil Prediction

Machine Learning (ML) offers new precision technologies with intelligent algorithms and robust computation. This technology benefits various agricultural industries, such as the palm oil sector, which possesses one of the most sustainable industries worldwide. Hence, an in-depth analysis was conducted, which is derived from previous research on ML utilisation in the palm oil in-dustry. The study provided a brief overview of widely used features and prediction algorithms and critically analysed current the state of ML-based palm oil prediction. This analysis is extended to the ML application in the palm oil industry and a comparison of related studies. The analysis was predicated on thoroughly examining the advantages and disadvantages of ML-based palm oil prediction and the proper identification of current and future agricultural industry challenges. Potential solutions for palm oil prediction were added to this list. Artificial intelligence and ma-chine vision were used to develop intelligent systems, revolutionising the palm oil industry. Overall, this article provided a framework for future research in the palm oil agricultural industry by highlighting the importance of ML.