Fuzzy query approach for crops planting dates optimization based on climate data

Abstract

Climate change is considered one of the most environmental phenomena of interest in the world nowadays. It affects many aspects of our life. One of the most affected aspects by climate change is agriculture. It is obvious that the ongoing changes in climate variables like temperature affects the suitability of crops plantation. That is, it make some crops became not suitable to plant in its traditional places at its traditional dates while it became more suitable to plant in other new places and/or dates. Based on the available historical spatial agro-climatic database, this paper presents a fuzzy query approach for discovering the new more suitable planting dates of crops in a given governorate of Egypt. The proposed approach consists of three phases, one phase for fuzzy clustering of the year days according to climate data, the second phase for defining crop suitability fuzzy membership functions and the last phase for fuzzy selection and optimization of suitable periods to plant a given crop like squash in a given governorate like Alexandria. The proposed approach proved that most of traditional plantation dates of squash in Alexandria become not suitable compared with the new discovered more suitable periods with a suitability measure for each period.