Climate Recommender System for Wheat Cultivation in North Egyptian Sinai Peninsula

Abstract

In this paper, a recommender system based on rough mereology was presented for predicting best cultivation dates for wheat in Egyptian Sinai Peninsula according to the required mean temperature for germination stage during October to December. The weather data was hourly collected from El-Arish weather station in north Sinai government from 1985 to 2013. As far as we know, this was the first study in Egypt regarding a wheat recommender expert system for predicting temperature and sowing dates in North Sinai. In current study, accurate weather forecasting information and suitable cultivation dates of wheat were obtained from the proposed recommender system. The results show that the proposed system can forecast different temperatures with minimum Mean Absolute Error (MAE). These findings may allow decision makers to take their proper decisions on managing agricultural development in new reclaimed areas like the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.