Fuzzy query approach for crops planting dates adaptation with climate changes

Abstract

Commonly, climate changes in both of temperature and humidity have significant impacts on agriculture. Obviously, the ongoing changes in such climate variables affect directly the plantation dates of most crops. In other words, many crops become not suitable to plant in its traditional places at the traditional plantation dates. Instead, such crops become more suitable to plant at other new or adjusted periods that were not suitable before. This paper provides a fuzzy query approach for adapting crops plantation dates with climate changes in a given place. The proposed approach consists of three phases, one for fuzzy clustering of the year days, the second one for defining the crop suitability membership functions and the third for fuzzy-based selection of suitable plantation periods. The proposed approach based mainly on the spatial agro-climatic database. It proved that more of traditional plantation dates become not suitable and it provides new and/or adjusted more suitable periods with a suitability degree for each one. The proposed approach has been applied on the squash crop respecting climate data changes of temperature and humidity in Alexandria governorate in Egypt. In consequent, the final results are presented to a set of agriculture researcher in the Agriculture research center (ARC) and they were agreed with the results.