Using Data Science to Improve the Identification of Plant Nutritional Status

Developing products for improving plant nutritional status, e.g. fertilizers or plant growth regulators, is an important topic to move towards sustainability in agriculture and to ensure to feed the world population. A key challenge is to identify when, what, and how much nutrients to add to plants’ growth environment. In this paper, we study a use case on how to characterize rapeseed plant nutrient deficiencies during their growth. A promising approach consists of deriving data from spectroscopy of leaves, and using this representation to predict what kind of deficiency (if any) plants are undergoing. We are considering three research questions: 1) from which day after onset of a nutrient deficiency we can identify it, 2) whether leaves that have sprouted under nutrient-rich conditions can still help in identifying problems. Third, and most importantly, performing the spectroscopy on the full range of wavelengths is expensive, which under production conditions allows for only relatively few samples. We therefore explore how to perform dimensionality reduction and preprocessing to achieve good predictive accuracy. We show that 1) deficiencies can be identified early on, 2) leaf generations help to predict nutrient deficiencies, and 3) that preprocessing increases the accuracy and dimensionality reduction can be performed without loss of accuracy. Along the way, we find that our some of our industry partners’ assumptions about the data do not seem to be borne out by our empirical results, and that the subset of data they initially selected turns out to be too easy to model. The full data leads to more informative insights.