The increasing menace of climate change constitutes a profound obstacle for contemporary farming, carrying grave implications for worldwide food availability. The effect of altering climatic parameters on agricultural output, particularly for essential staple commodities, fuels worry regarding prospective harvests. This investigation explores the likely repercussions of climate change on cotton cultivation by merging archival climate records, Global Climate Model (GCMs, CMIP3) forecasts, and cotton production statistics. A broad spectrum of machine learning (ML) methodologies is applied, including multiple regression, k-nearest neighbors (KNN), boosted tree techniques, and several variants of artificial neural networks (ANNs), to delve into the intricate linkage between climatic drivers and cotton productivity. The models are built and verified using climatic and crop output data obtained from three districts within Punjab, Pakistan, across the timeframe 1991 to 2020. To anticipate future production outcomes, climatic projections from General Circulation Models (GCMs) are refined via downscaling under the SRA1B, A2, and B1 emission trajectories, facilitating outlooks extending to 2050. The outcomes reveal that precipitation exerts a trivial influence on cotton output (R = 0.0002), while peak temperature (R = -0.183) stands out as the foremost climatic determinant shaping yield, trailed by lowest temperature (R = 0.248). Of the tested architectures, the generalized feedforward (GFF) network delivered the optimal results (R = 0.960, MSE = 0.110, NMSE = 0.187, MAE = 0.269), exceeding the performance of the probabilistic neural network (PNN), KNN, multilayer perceptron (MLP), and boosted trees. By comparison, linear regression (LR) and multiple regression formulations registered weaker predictive power. The trustworthiness of GFF and KNN for generating yield projections (R² = 0.892, 0.861) endorses their suitability for reliable forecasting. The study calculates a 4.5% contraction in cotton harvest by 2050, measured against the peak recorded yield for the locality, stressing the footprint of climate change on cotton farming and its latent hazard to food supply. Nonetheless, the flexible strength of the ANN (GFF) frameworks under varying climate storylines delivers auspicious means for weaving ML into climate-adaptive cultivation regimes, advancing durable agrarian safety and curbing the detrimental fallout of climate shifts on nutrition provision.
Reliable estimation of crop yield is vital for refining farming operations and guaranteeing food supply. This investigation tested the capacity of machine learning techniques to estimate tomato yield using meteorological measurements, spectral reflectance bands, and vegetation indices subjected to different nitrogen levels and bio-stimulant applications to generate variation in crop development. UAV-mounted sensors captured spectral information across seven acquisition dates spanning October 27 to December 15, 2023, matching critical developmental windows: vegetative establishment (acquisition 1), anthesis (acquisitions 2 and 3), fruit set and enlargement (acquisitions 4, 5, and 6), and initial maturation (acquisition 7). Discriminating explanatory variables were selected via the Pearson correlation metric (r > 0.65, P < 0.05), incorporating Near Infrared (NIR), Red Edge, and Red wavebands, together with vegetation indices comprising NDVI, GNDVI, NDRE, and SAVI. Remotely sensed canopy signatures gathered throughout the fruit set and enlargement window (acquisitions 5 and 6) displayed the tightest association with harvested yield (r = 0.66–0.74), reinforcing the necessity of spectral intelligence from the middle to latter parts of the cycle. When comparing predictive algorithms, both linear regression (LR) and XGBoost yielded the strongest predictive skill, producing root mean squared error (RMSE) figures of 16.13 kg and 16.15 kg, respectively, matched with R² values reaching 0.63. Support vector machine (SVM) and decision tree (DT) implementations also delivered competent outcomes, achieving RMSE scores of 17.15 kg and 17.18 kg, respectively. By comparison, the deep learning architecture lagged notably (RMSE = 23.49 kg, R² = 0.23), plausibly attributable to data scarcity. This research spotlights the prognostic capability inherent in spectral wavebands and underscores the centrality of growth-stage-aligned spectral acquisition for yield forecasting.
Obtaining body mass in large-scale rearing and production environments is difficult, making non-contact assessment methods indispensable. This paper introduces an original pipeline for predicting pig body mass based on an adapted mask region convolutional neural network (mask R-CNN). The adaptation deploys ResNeSt as the backbone feature-extraction architecture, aiming to bolster the capacity to derive features from imagery. A feature pyramid network (FPN) was appended to this backbone to enable feature merging across multiple scales. Within the region proposal network (RPN), a channel attention mechanism (CAM) was installed alongside a spatial attention mechanism (SAM), enabling the dynamic combination of localized characteristics with their long-range interdependencies. This configuration captures holistic contextual knowledge, ultimately improving segmentation fidelity. The adapted architecture achieved precision (P) of 90.33%, recall (R) of 89.85%, and mean average precision (MAP) of 95.21%, thereby isolating pig areas in images with notable effectiveness. Five descriptive features drawn from the imagery were examined: back area, body length, body width, average depth, and eccentricity. Leveraging the pig depth images, five regression learning algorithms—ordinary least squares (OLS), AdaBoost, CatBoost, XGBoost, and random forest (RF)—were trained to forecast mass values. AdaBoost delivered the strongest predictive performance, evidenced by a coefficient of determination (R2) of 0.987, a mean absolute error (MAE) of 2.96 kg, a mean square error (MSE) of 12.87 kg², and a mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) of 8.45%. The experimental results confirm that machine learning models can reliably predict pig mass, providing a technical foundation for the informed management of pig production facilities.
Achieving food availability, advancing the long-term viability of farming, and propelling economic progress. However, current forecasting frameworks often overlook the specific characteristics of rice yield distributions, which vary across regions, exhibit skewness, and are constrained by fixed lower and upper thresholds, conforming to a four-parameter beta distribution. The consequence is outputs that are less reliable and can potentially misguide decision-making. Furthermore, a majority of techniques fall short in modeling the intricate variable interactions that arise when satellite observations are fused with field survey measurements, an integration widely viewed as essential for boosting forecast fidelity and streamlining cultivation methods. To remedy these deficiencies, the present research proposes a four-parameter beta Generalized Linear Mixed Model (GLMM) and advances it into a four-parameter beta Generalized Mixed Effect Tree (GMET). This four-parameter beta GMET extends the four-parameter beta GLMM architecture by embedding a regression tree mechanism, thereby providing superior flexibility for representing non-linear and interaction-laden dependencies. Deploying this analytical framework on empirical data from Central Kalimantan and Karawang yields significant gains over earlier approaches, as evidenced by markedly lower AIC and RRMSE metrics. Significantly, the investigation finds that time-lagged reflectance values from bands 4 and 8 and the NDVI index captured by Sentinel-2A satellites are the dominant determinants of rice productivity, overshadowing the explanatory contribution of farmer questionnaire responses. This finding underscores the promise of remotely sensed data as a cornerstone for rice yield estimation, offering a more streamlined, less resource-intensive alternative to reliance on farmer-reported data. By further refining satellite-based technologies, upcoming initiatives in yield forecasting can realize superior efficiency and precision, thereby underpinning evidence-based choices in agricultural governance.