scholarly journals Identifying the Contributions of Multi-Source Data for Winter Wheat Yield Prediction in China

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 750 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan Cao ◽  
Zhao Zhang ◽  
Fulu Tao ◽  
Liangliang Zhang ◽  
Yuchuan Luo ◽  
...  

Wheat is a leading cereal grain throughout the world. Timely and reliable wheat yield prediction at a large scale is essential for the agricultural supply chain and global food security, especially in China as an important wheat producing and consuming country. The conventional approach using either climate or satellite data or both to build empirical and crop models has prevailed for decades. However, to what extent climate and satellite data can improve yield prediction is still unknown. In addition, socio-economic (SC) factors may also improve crop yield prediction, but their contributions need in-depth investigation, especially in regions with good irrigation conditions, sufficient fertilization, and pesticide application. Here, we performed the first attempt to predict wheat yield across China from 2001 to 2015 at the county-level by integrating multi-source data, including monthly climate data, satellite data (i.e., Vegetation indices (VIs)), and SC factors. The results show that incorporating all the datasets by using three machine learning methods (Ridge Regression (RR), Random Forest (RF), and Light Gradient Boosting (LightGBM)) can achieve the best performance in yield prediction (R2: 0.68~0.75), with the most individual contributions from climate (~0.53), followed by VIs (~0.45), and SC factors (~0.30). In addition, the combinations of VIs and climate data can capture inter-annual yield variability more effectively than other combinations (e.g., combinations of climate and SC, and combinations of VIs and SC), while combining SC with climate data can better capture spatial yield variability than others. Climate data can provide extra and unique information across the entire growing season, while the peak stage of VIs (Mar.~Apr.) do so. Furthermore, incorporating spatial information and soil proprieties into the benchmark models can improve wheat yield prediction by 0.06 and 0.12, respectively. The optimal wheat prediction can be achieved with approximately a two-month leading time before maturity. Our study develops timely and robust methods for winter wheat yield prediction at a large scale in China, which can be applied to other crops and regions.

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jichong Han ◽  
Zhao Zhang ◽  
Juan Cao ◽  
Yuchuan Luo ◽  
Liangliang Zhang ◽  
...  

Wheat is one of the main crops in China, and crop yield prediction is important for regional trade and national food security. There are increasing concerns with respect to how to integrate multi-source data and employ machine learning techniques to establish a simple, timely, and accurate crop yield prediction model at an administrative unit. Many previous studies were mainly focused on the whole crop growth period through expensive manual surveys, remote sensing, or climate data. However, the effect of selecting different time window on yield prediction was still unknown. Thus, we separated the whole growth period into four time windows and assessed their corresponding predictive ability by taking the major winter wheat production regions of China as an example in the study. Firstly we developed a modeling framework to integrate climate data, remote sensing data and soil data to predict winter wheat yield based on the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform. The results show that the models can accurately predict yield 1~2 months before the harvesting dates at the county level in China with an R2 > 0.75 and yield error less than 10%. Support vector machine (SVM), Gaussian process regression (GPR), and random forest (RF) represent the top three best methods for predicting yields among the eight typical machine learning models tested in this study. In addition, we also found that different agricultural zones and temporal training settings affect prediction accuracy. The three models perform better as more winter wheat growing season information becomes available. Our findings highlight a potentially powerful tool to predict yield using multiple-source data and machine learning in other regions and for crops.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liangliang Zhang ◽  
Zhao Zhang ◽  
Yuchuan Luo ◽  
Juan Cao ◽  
Fulu Tao

Maize is an extremely important grain crop, and the demand has increased sharply throughout the world. China contributes nearly one-fifth of the total production alone with its decreasing arable land. Timely and accurate prediction of maize yield in China is critical for ensuring global food security. Previous studies primarily used either visible or near-infrared (NIR) based vegetation indices (VIs), or climate data, or both to predict crop yield. However, other satellite data from different spectral bands have been underutilized, which contain unique information on crop growth and yield. In addition, although a joint application of multi-source data significantly improves crop yield prediction, the combinations of input variables that could achieve the best results have not been well investigated. Here we integrated optical, fluorescence, thermal satellite, and environmental data to predict county-level maize yield across four agro-ecological zones (AEZs) in China using a regression-based method (LASSO), two machine learning (ML) methods (RF and XGBoost), and deep learning (DL) network (LSTM). The results showed that combining multi-source data explained more than 75% of yield variation. Satellite data at the silking stage contributed more information than other variables, and solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) had an almost equivalent performance with the enhanced vegetation index (EVI) largely due to the low signal to noise ratio and coarse spatial resolution. The extremely high temperature and vapor pressure deficit during the reproductive period were the most important climate variables affecting maize production in China. Soil properties and management factors contained extra information on crop growth conditions that cannot be fully captured by satellite and climate data. We found that ML and DL approaches definitely outperformed regression-based methods, and ML had more computational efficiency and easier generalizations relative to DL. Our study is an important effort to combine multi-source remote sensed and environmental data for large-scale yield prediction. The proposed methodology provides a paradigm for other crop yield predictions and in other regions.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amit Kumar Srivast ◽  
Nima Safaei ◽  
Saeed Khaki ◽  
Gina Lopez ◽  
Wenzhi Zeng ◽  
...  

Abstract Crop yield forecasting depends on many interactive factors including crop genotype, weather, soil, and management practices. This study analyzes the performance of machine learning and deep learning methods for winter wheat yield prediction using extensive datasets of weather, soil, and crop phenology. We propose a convolutional neural network (CNN) which uses the 1-dimentional convolution operation to capture the time dependencies of environmental variables. The proposed CNN, evaluated along with other machine learning models for winter wheat yield prediction in Germany, outperformed all other models tested. To address the seasonality, weekly features were used that explicitly take soil moisture and meteorological events into account. Our results indicated that nonlinear models such as deep learning models and XGboost are more effective in finding the functional relationship between the crop yield and input data compared to linear models and deep neural networks had a higher prediction accuracy than XGboost. One of the main limitations of machine learning models is their black box property. Therefore, we moved beyond prediction and performed feature selection, as it provides key results towards explaining yield prediction (variable importance by time). As such, our study indicates which variables have the most significant effect on winter wheat yield.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (18) ◽  
pp. 3760
Author(s):  
Linghua Meng ◽  
Huanjun Liu ◽  
Susan L. Ustin ◽  
Xinle Zhang

Timely and reliable maize yield prediction is essential for the agricultural supply chain and food security. Previous studies using either climate or satellite data or both to build empirical or statistical models have prevailed for decades. However, to what extent climate and satellite data can improve yield prediction is still unknown. In addition, fertilizer information may also improve crop yield prediction, especially in regions with different fertilizer systems, such as cover crop, mineral fertilizer, or compost. Machine learning (ML) has been widely and successfully applied in crop yield prediction. Here, we attempted to predict maize yield from 1994 to 2007 at the plot scale by integrating multi-source data, including monthly climate data, satellite data (i.e., vegetation indices (VIs)), fertilizer data, and soil data to explore the accuracy of different inputs to yield prediction. The results show that incorporating all of the datasets using random forests (RF) and AB (adaptive boosting) can achieve better performances in yield prediction (R2: 0.85~0.98). In addition, the combination of VIs, climate data, and soil data (VCS) can predict maize yield more effectively than other combinations (e.g., combinations of all data and combinations of VIs and soil data). Furthermore, we also found that including different fertilizer systems had different prediction accuracies. This paper aggregates data from multiple sources and distinguishes the effects of different fertilization scenarios on crop yield predictions. In addition, the effects of different data on crop yield were analyzed in this study. Our study provides a paradigm that can be used to improve yield predictions for other crops and is an important effort that combines multi-source remotely sensed and environmental data for maize yield prediction at the plot scale and develops timely and robust methods for maize yield prediction grown under different fertilizing systems.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wenqiang Xie ◽  
Shuangshuang Wang ◽  
Xiaodong Yan

Abstract Winter wheat is widely planted in China. The changes of winter wheat yield and quality are related to the food security of human society. Climate change has an important impact on the yield and quality of winter wheat. Diurnal temperature range (DTR) is an important factor affecting the yield and protein content of winter wheat. Furthermore, climate model is one of the main sources of error in crop model simulations of yields. Therefore, how to improve the accuracy of climate data has become an important concern for scholars.Previous model evaluations for the entire country or region cannot answer which model is suitable for the estimation of future winter wheat yield. Therefore, we evaluated the ability of climate models to simulate DTR within the range of winter wheat growing regions in China to identify the most suitable climate models for winter wheat yield and quality projections. The results show that CMIP6 models can basically reproduce the DTR of winter wheat-growing regions in China, but there are discrepancies in the simulations between nationwide and winter wheat-growing regions. EC-Earth3-Veg has the best simulation of climate DTR for wheat-growing regions (TS=0.848) and nationwide (TS=0.842), and ACCESS-CM2 has the strongest ability to simulate the annual growing season DTR (TS=0.46). In summary, in the estimation of future winter wheat yield, attention should be given to the selection of models suitable for the actual growing regions and the growing seasons of winter wheat.


2021 ◽  
Vol 262 ◽  
pp. 112514
Author(s):  
Luwei Feng ◽  
Yumiao Wang ◽  
Zhou Zhang ◽  
Qingyun Du

Agriculture ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 32
Author(s):  
Elżbieta Wójcik-Gront ◽  
Marzena Iwańska ◽  
Agnieszka Wnuk ◽  
Tadeusz Oleksiak

Among European countries, Poland has the largest gap in the grain yield of winter wheat, and thus the greatest potential to reduce this yield gap. This paper aims to recognize the main reasons for winter wheat yield variability and shed the light on possible reasons for this gap. We used long-term datasets (2008–2018) from individual commercial farms obtained by the Laboratory of Economics of Seed and Plant Breeding of Plant Breeding and Acclimatization Institute (IHAR)-National Research Institute (Poland) and the experimental fields with high, close to potential yield, in the Polish Post-Registration Variety Testing System in multi-environmental trials. We took into account environment, management and genetic variables. Environment was considered through soil class representing soil fertility. For the crop management, the rates of mineral fertilization, the use of pesticides and the type of pre-crop were considered. Genotype was represented by the independent variable year of cultivar registration or year of starting its cultivation in Poland. The analysis was performed using the CART (Classification and Regression Trees). The winter wheat yield variability was mostly dependent on the amount of nitrogen fertilization applied, soil quality, and type of pre-crop. Genetic variable was also important, which means that plant breeding has successfully increased genetic yield potential especially during the last several years. In general, changes to management practices are needed to lower the variability of winter wheat yield and possibly to close the yield gap in Poland.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 1744 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xinlei Wang ◽  
Jianxi Huang ◽  
Quanlong Feng ◽  
Dongqin Yin

Timely and accurate forecasting of crop yields is crucial to food security and sustainable development in the agricultural sector. However, winter wheat yield estimation and forecasting on a regional scale still remains challenging. In this study, we established a two-branch deep learning model to predict winter wheat yield in the main producing regions of China at the county level. The first branch of the model was constructed based on the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks with inputs from meteorological and remote sensing data. Another branch was constructed using Convolution Neural Networks (CNN) to model static soil features. The model was then trained using the detrended statistical yield data during 1982 to 2015 and evaluated by leave-one-year-out-validation. The evaluation results showed a promising performance of the model with the overall R 2 and RMSE of 0.77 and 721 kg/ha, respectively. We further conducted yield prediction and uncertainty analysis based on the two-branch model and obtained the forecast accuracy in one month prior to harvest of 0.75 and 732 kg/ha. Results also showed that while yield detrending could potentially introduce higher uncertainty, it had the advantage of improving the model performance in yield prediction.


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