Search

Smart management of weather data is an essential step toward implementing sustainability and precision in agriculture. It represents an important input for numerous tasks, such as crop growth, development, yield, and irrigation scheduling, to name a few. Advances in technology allow collecting this weather data from heterogeneous sources with high temporal resolution and at low cost. Generating and using these data in their raw form makes no sense, and therefore implementing adequate infrastructure and tools is necessary. For that purpose, this paper presents a smart weather data management system evaluated using data from a meteorological station installed in our study area covering the period from 2013 to 2020 at a half-hourly scale. The proposed system makes use of state-of-the-art statistical methods, machine learning, and deep learning models to derive actionable insights from these raw data. The general architecture is made up of four layers: data acquisition, data storage, data processing, and application layers. The data sources include real-time sensors, IoT devices, reanalysis data, and raw files. The data are then checked for errors and missing values using a proposed method based on ERA5-Land reanalysis data and deep learning. The resulting coefficient of determination (R2) and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) for this method were 0.96 and 0.04, respectively, for the scaled air temperature estimate. The MongoDB NoSQL database is used for storage thanks to its ability to deal with real-world big data. The system offers various services such as (i) weather time series forecasts, (ii) visualization and analysis of meteorological data, and (iii) the use of machine learning to estimate the reference evapotranspiration (ET0) needed for efficient irrigation. To this, the platform uses the XGBoost model to achieve the precision of the Penman–Monteith method while using a limited number of meteorological variables (air temperature and global solar radiation). Results for this approach give R2 = 0.97 and RMSE = 0.07. This system represents the first incremental step toward implementing smart and sustainable agriculture in Morocco. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research is focused on developing an AI model that utilizes multispectral camera data from the Souss-Massa region. The model aims to estimate the yield and identify a range of diseases in Argan trees through meticulous on-field investigations. Initially, the work is focused on understanding the resistance of Argan plants against different diseases, based on non-irrigated and irrigated Argan trees as well as planted ones. The results show that disease resistance is high in the case of non-irrigated Argan trees and low in the case of irrigated trees. In addition, we conducted a detailed study of the Argan trees to provide a comprehensive view of the plant’s health. Utilizing machine-learning techniques, the yield estimation model suggests that it is possible to achieve up to 97% accuracy in yield estimation, processing data at an impressive rate of 33 images per second. After careful consideration and analysis, we have concluded that machine counting is the most suitable technique for Argan plants. Machine counting and disease detection offer high precision, fast and efficient data processing and cost-effectiveness. Additionally, it is less labour-intensive and can be easily integrated into the existing production process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]