Fuzzy time series approach for optimizing crops planting dates with climate changes

Abstract

Crops plantation dates is considered one of the most important factors in the success of crops plantation process. Obviously, each crop needs suitable values of climate variables to be planted in a certain soil. In other words, a crop plantation in different soils needs different suitable values of the climate variables. Consequently, each soil has a range of suitable values of climate variables to ensure a productive and profitable plantation process for a specific crop. Unfortunately, the ongoing changes in climate variables affect mainly the suitability of planting most crops in the same soil at the same traditional dates. So, such changes in climate variables like temperature and humidity make the traditional plantation dates of some crops in a given place became not suitable. Instead, it becomes more suitable to plant at other different dates that were not suitable before. This paper presents a fuzzy set based approach for adjust crops plantation dates reflecting climate changes. The proposed approach has three main phases, one for defining a crop suitability membership functions, the second for calculating the suitability degrees of year days, and the last one for selection and optimization of most perfect plantation dates. It has been applied on the potatoes crop with temperature and humidity as climate variables in Alexandria governorate in Egypt. In consequent, the final results are presented to a set of agriculture researchers in the Agriculture Research Center (ARC) in Egypt and they admired the results.