Early-season biomass and weather enable robust cereal rye cover crop biomass predictions
Date
2024-02-13
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Agricultural & Environmental Letters
Abstract
Farmers need accurate estimates of winter cover crop biomass to make informed decisions on termination timing or to estimate potential release of nitrogen from cover crop residues to subsequent cash crops. Utilizing data from an extensive experiment across 11 states from 2016 to 2020, this study explores the most reliable predictors for determining cereal rye cover crop biomass at the time of termination. Our findings demonstrate a strong relationship between early-season and late-season cover crop biomass. Employing a random forest model, we predicted late-season cereal rye biomass with a margin of error of approximately 1,000 kg ha−1 based on early-season biomass, growing degree days, cereal rye planting and termination dates, photosynthetically active radiation, precipitation, and site coordinates as predictors. Our results suggest that similar modeling approaches could be combined with remotely sensed early-season biomass estimations to improve the accuracy of predicting winter cover crop biomass at termination for decision support tools.
Core Ideas
- Cereal rye winter cover crop biomass modeled on data from 35 site-years.
- We found a strong relationship between early and late-season biomass.
- Random forest model with early-season biomass and weather data performed well.
- Similar approach could improve decision support tools for cover crop management.
Graphical Abstract available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/ael2.20121
Effect size estimates from the generalized linear mixed effects model prediction late-season cereal rye cover crop biomass. All covariates were standardized, and significant relationships are indicated by *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01, and ***p < 0.001.
Abbreviations
CGDD
cumulative growing degree days
GLMM
generalized linear mixed effects model
PAR
photosynthetically active radiation
Description
This article was originally published in Agricultural & Environmental Letters. The version of record is available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/ael2.20121. © 2024 The Authors. Agricultural & Environmental Letters published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Keywords
Citation
Huddell, A., Needelman, B., Law, E. P., Ackroyd, V. J., Bagavathiannan, M. V., Bradley, K., Davis, A. S., Evans, J. A., Everman, W. J., Flessner, M., Jordan, N., Schwartz-Lazaro, L. M., Leon, R. G., Lindquist, J., Norsworthy, J. K., Shergill, L. S., VanGessel, M., & Mirsky, S. B. (2024). Early-season biomass and weather enable robust cereal rye cover crop biomass predictions. Agricultural & Environmental Letters, 9, e20121. https://doi.org/10.1002/ael2.20121