Evaluating the accuracy of ARMA and multi-index methods for predicting winter wheat maturity date

Accurate and timely prediction of regional winter wheat maturity date can provide essential information to improve the management of agriculture and avoid declines in the yield and quality of crops. In this paper, we propose the use of an autoregressive moving-average model to predict vegetation indices on 1, 9, and 17 May each year, and applied them to the methods of evaluating crop maturity based on vegetation indices. Growing degree days and a widely applied local empirical method were selected to explore and compare the feasibility of several methods. We analyzed winter wheat harvested from the Guanzhong Plain during 2003-2013 and used leave-one-out cross-validation to compare and verify the performance of the maturity prediction methods.

The results demonstrated that (i) the vegetation index methods and growing degree days methods predicted maturity with higher accuracy than did the widely applied local empirical method, and (ii) the two-step filtering method based on future meteorological data from The Observing System Research and Predictability Experiment Interactive Grand Global Ensemble exhibited the highest prediction accuracy on 1 May and had the lowest error fluctuation range on 17 May.

These results provide new insights for predicting regional crop maturity, deploying agricultural harvesting equipment in various regions, and avoiding decreases in crop yields caused by adverse weather. © 2021 Society of Chemical Industry.