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Interest in sustainable farming approaches has surged, especially within hyper-arid environments where acute water shortages make food security a pressing priority. This increased focus arises from the goal of agricultural independence in light of geopolitical volatility, rising population numbers, climate disruption, and the drive to decrease reliance on imported food. The present work investigates novel, data-centric methods specifically engineered for agriculture under such demanding circumstances, concentrating on the exploitation of CO₂ enrichment to amplify resource efficiency by accelerating plant development and fine-tuning input application within closed greenhouse structures. Within this study, a data-driven model predictive control (MPC) system is deployed in a greenhouse context to refine irrigation timing. The primary emphasis lies in harnessing the capability of an extreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) model to project real-time transpiration fluxes, accounting for the complex interdependencies between microclimatic variables and physiological shifts that influence transpiration. The XGBoost framework is designed to ingest microclimate observations—namely solar radiation, internal air temperature, internal relative humidity, and internal CO₂ molar fraction—as well as vegetation indices extracted from hyperspectral reflectance measurements, including NDVI, WBI, and PRI, all serving as forecasting inputs. The predictive model achieved strong fidelity, registering an R² of 97.1% alongside an RMSE of 0.417 mmol/m²/s for transpiration rate estimation. The trained XGBoost is subsequently embedded into the MPC scheme to steer irrigation delivery while upholding target soil water status. This integrated controller is then applied to govern watering tactics across two differing CO₂ supplementation settings: 400 ppm and 1000 ppm. Outcomes from this work reveal that the MPC-driven irrigation regime yields a 42.2% reduction in water use across a one-week forecast horizon when contrasted with the baseline irrigation protocol, irrespective of CO₂ level. Moreover, operating the MPC controller under the distinct CO₂ regimes shows a 34% decrease in water consumption at the 1000 ppm enrichment level relative to the 400 ppm condition. These findings highlight the value of MPC within enclosed greenhouse facilities, stressing the gains offered by advanced predictive analytics, multi-source data fusion, and continuous receding-horizon optimization for realizing superior irrigation regulation. The work equally accentuates the role of CO₂ fertilization in sealed agricultural greenhouses—particularly in zones subject to intense solar irradiance—as a potent measure for curbing water expenditure.

Automated phenotyping, the automated measurement of plant characteristics, supports breeders and growers in producing vigorous, resilient crops. An early-detection tool can accelerate the discovery of plant resistance and swiftly identify problematic breeding outcomes. Numerous phenotyping objectives of this kind can be met by analyzing images captured by simple, inexpensive RGB-D cameras. The present work focuses on a case study — assessing the degree of resistance that tomato hybrids exhibit against the tomato yellow leaf curl virus (TYLCV) in commercial greenhouses. This poses a tough challenge, given that discriminating between resistance classes from imagery is difficult even for seasoned breeders. A substantial image collection was assembled from a trial encompassing many tomato hybrids with different resistance ratings. Depth data served to pinpoint the highest section of the tomato plant. Subsequently, deep learning networks were deployed to categorize the distinct resistance classes. For spotting plants with visual indicators, our techniques achieved an accuracy of 0.928, a precision of 0.934, and a recall of 0.95. In the multi-class scenario, an accuracy of 0.76 was achieved in identifying the appropriate level, with an error of 0.278. Our pipelines are not exclusively tailored for this task and can be expanded to other undertakings that detect various plant diseases with outward signs, including ToBRFV, mildew, ToMV, and others.

The evaluation of plants in greenhouse environments is an essential phase in the development and assessment of new herbicides, as it enables controlled examination of species responses to different formulations and concentrations. To this end, experiments are performed in greenhouses where the injury inflicted on treated plants is monitored daily. Each pot is typically assessed by comparing it against an untreated reference pot, designated as a control. Presently, this task is carried out pot by pot via a time-intensive procedure reliant on visual judgments made by experienced specialists. Digital instruments are needed to shorten the time required and to equip specialists with approaches that are both more objective and more repeatable for quantifying plant injury. A novel solution, grounded in image processing and deep learning, is introduced to estimate plant injury across different developmental stages in the greenhouse. Plants are exposed to multiple injury types and phases, and photographs of them are taken to assemble a dataset. The accessible annotation corresponds to the injury estimation score supplied by the specialists. The proposed framework attempts to replicate the way specialists assess plant injury through a two-stage process. First, the reduction in biomass of the evaluated plant relative to its control plant is quantified; second, potential disease markers on the plant are identified. The former step uses classical image processing methods, while the latter relies on a deep learning-based multi-label classification model for symptom recognition. The algorithm has been validated on two species: Glycine max (soybean) and Amaranthus retroflexus (redroot amaranth). Coefficients of determination (R²) of 0.87 and 0.89 are attained, respectively, for injury estimation. The approach enhances both the efficiency and the objectivity of the current manual workflow.