Machine learning for predicting greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural soils

Abstract

Machine learning (ML) models are increasingly used to study complex environmental phenomena with high variability in time and space. In this study, the potential of exploiting three categories of ML regression models, including classical regression, shallow learning and deep learning for predicting soil greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from an agricultural field was explored. Carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrous oxide (N2O) fluxes, as well as various environmental, agronomic and soil data were measured at the site over a five-year period in Quebec, Canada. The rigorous analysis, which included statistical comparison and cross-validation for the prediction of CO2 and N2O fluxes, confirmed that the LSTM model performed the best among the considered ML models with the highest R coefficient and the lowest root mean squared error (RMSE) values (R = 0.87 and RMSE = 30.3 mg·m−2·hr−1 for CO2 flux prediction and R = 0.86 and RMSE = 0.19 mg·m−2·hr−1 for N2O flux prediction). The predictive performances of LSTM were more accurate than those simulated in a previous study conducted by a biophysical-based Root Zone Water Quality Model (RZWQM2). The classical regression models (namely RF, SVM and LASSO) satisfactorily simulated cyclical and seasonal variations of CO2 fluxes (R = 0.75, 0.71 and 0.68, respectively); however, they failed to reasonably predict the peak values of N2O fluxes (R < 0.25). Shallow ML was found to be less effective in predicting GHG fluxes than other considered ML models (R < 0.7 for CO2 flux and R < 0.3 for estimating N2O fluxes) and was the most sensitive to hyperparameter tuning. Based on this comprehensive comparison study, it was elicited that the LSTM model can be employed successfully in simulating GHG emissions from agricultural soils, providing a new perspective on the application of machine learning modeling for predicting GHG emissions to the environment.