Aitazaz A. Farooque

Aitazaz A. Farooque
University of Prince Edward Island | UPEI · School of Sustainable Design Engineering

PhD, PEng

About

156
Publications
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2,086
Citations

Publications

Publications (156)
Article
Water quality modeling in riverine systems is crucial for effective water resource management and pollution mitigation planning. However, the intricate interplay of anthropogenic activities with hydrological, climatic, and fluvial processes presents significant challenges in developing robust models for predicting water quality parameters. This stu...
Preprint
Full-text available
The Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) can be an indicator for plant growth response and ultimately yield to water and nitrogen (N) requirements in semi-arid environments. To assess the growth and development of maize through NDVI measurements under various N and irrigation water regimes, a field trial was conducted over two consecutive...
Article
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This study introduced a novel approach to 3D image segmentation utilizing a neural network framework applied to 2D depth map imagery, with Z axis values visualized through color gradation. This research involved comprehensive data collection from mechanically harvested wild blueberries to populate 3D and red–green–blue (RGB) images of filled totes...
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Efficient mechanical harvesting of wild blueberries across uneven topographies calls for precise header height adjustments to optimize fruit picking. Conventionally, an operator requires manual adjustment of the harvester header to accommodate the spatial variations in plant height, fruit zone, and field terrain. This can result in inadequate heade...
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This study assessed dichlobenil’s potential to manage hair fescue in lowbush blueberry when targeted or broadcast-applied (7000 g ai ha ⁻¹ ) as justification for developing a precision-targeted applicator. A randomized complete block design was used to assess both application methods, and results were compared with industry-standard propanamide (22...
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Biochar is a carbon-rich material produced through the pyrolysis of organic biomass. Its unique properties make it a versatile asset in agricultural and environmental management. This review paper provides scientific insights into how biochar affects soil’s physical, chemical, and biological properties. It then discusses how these changes can impac...
Article
Topographical variations strongly influence the spatial variability of soil physicochemical properties by affecting water retention, nutrient distribution and biochemical activity. These topography‐driven differences in soil dynamics can significantly impact greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Understanding the variation in GHG emissions over the growi...
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In this research, a novel explainable multi-level ensemble learning framework has been developed to accurately monitor the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission drivers of the Maritime potato crop system i.e., Carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrous oxide (N2O), and water vapour (H2O). For this purpose, alongside the GHG emission drivers, the hydro-meteorological an...
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To attain net zero energy‐ready building (NZErB) status, various research efforts have focused on identifying potential strategies and creating stringent code compliances for builders. This review presents a comparative assessment of Canadian newly constructed, retrofitted, and potential retrofit buildings from the mid‐1900s to 1990, all aiming for...
Article
Total Dissolved Gas (TDG) supersaturation is a critical ecological indicator for assessing water quality downstream of high dam reservoirs. TDG concentration exceeding 110 % can cause gas-bubble trauma in fish, leading to mortality and adversely affecting other aquatic organisms. We used hourly datasets of Water Temperature, Barometric Pressure, Sp...
Article
Drought stands as a highly perilous natural catastrophe that impacts numerous facets of human existence. Drought data is nonstationary and noisy, posing challenges for accurate forecasting. This study proposes a novel hybrid framework integrating TVF-EMD preprocessing, LASSO feature selection and Ensemble Deep RVFL modeling for improved multistep a...
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The rapid expansion of industrialization has resulted in the release of multiple ecological contaminants in gaseous, liquid, and solid forms, which pose significant environmental risks to many different ecosystems. The efficient and cost‐effective removal of these environmental pollutants has attracted global attention. This growing concern has pro...
Article
Reanalysis and satellite-based rainfall packages are useful for monitoring hydroclimatic extremes. These advanced tools can be used as an early-warning system for decision-making during extreme events. Hurricane Dorian and Fiona impacted the North Atlantic from September 6–9, 2019 and September 22–25, 2022, respectively. This study evaluated the Ca...
Article
Full-text available
This study explores the role of leguminous crops like lima bean in enhancing soil quality and ecosystem stability. Despite existing studies on agronomic aspects, there is a significant research gap on its impact on soil organic matter level, microbial activity, soil health, and nutrient availability. Therefore, this study examines the capacity of l...
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While spot spraying has gained increasing popularity in recent years, spot application of granule agrochemical has seen little development. Despite the potential for the technology, there currently exists no commercially available granular applicators capable of spot application. Therefore, the goal of this study was to design, build, and lab evalu...
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Biochar has emerged as a promising soil supplement, offering a sustainable solution for mitigating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in agricultural soils over the past two decades. Produced through the pyrolysis of organic materials under anaerobic conditions, biochar’s quality is heavily influenced by pyrolysis conditions and feedstock types. This c...
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Greenhouse gases (GHGs) like nitrous oxide (N2O), carbon dioxide (CO2), and methane (CH4) are both emitted and removed by soils. Accurate worldwide allocations of carbon budget are essential for land use planning, global climate change, and climate-related research. Precise measurements, drivers, and mitigation strategies are necessary, given agric...
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Prince Edward Island (PEI) is an agricultural province heavily relying on rainfed agriculture. The island has already experienced significant impacts from climate change. Accurate projections of PEI temperature extreme indices are required to mitigate and adapt to the changing climate conditions. This study aims to develop ensemble projections usin...
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For sustainable agriculture, irrigation is one of the most important management practices in a semi-arid climate. Determining the site-specific soil type-based irrigation water requirements requires the development of a soil water characteristics curve (SWCC). This study focuses on exploring the suitability of analytical SWCC models based on the ob...
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The potential of advanced tree-based models and optimized deep learning algorithms to predict fluvial bedload transport was explored, identifying the most flexible and accurate algorithm, and the optimum set of readily available and reliable inputs. Using 926 datasets for 20 rivers, the performance of three groups of models was tested: (1) standalo...
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Agricultural dykelands in Nova Scotia rely heavily on a surface drainage technique called land forming, which is used to alter the topography of fields to improve drainage. The presence of land-formed fields provides useful information to better understand land utilization on these lands vulnerable to rising sea levels. Current field boundaries del...
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Dielectric properties are crucial in understanding the behavior of water within soil, particularly the soil water content (SWC), as they measure a material’s ability to store an electric charge and are influenced by water and other minerals in the soil. However, a comprehensive review paper is needed that synthesizes the latest developments in this...
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Hair fescue is an economically destructive, tuft‐forming weed common in wild blueberry fields. The current management of hair fescue is almost completely reliant on pronamide (3,5‐dichloro‐N‐[2‐methylbut‐3‐yn‐2‐yl]benzamide) herbicide with few other products demonstrating effectiveness. Dichlobenil (2,6‐dichlorobenzonitrile) is a group 29 herbicide...
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The Prairie region of Canada is an agriculture-intensive area and is strategic to Canada's food security. Moisture deficit due to extreme temperatures leading to high evapotranspiration can have significant impacts on water availability, resulting in poor crop yield. The primary objective of this study is to quantify the spatial structure and depen...
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Citation: Abdulraheem, M.I.; Moshood, A.Y.; Li, L.; Taiwo, L.B.; Oyedele, A.O.; Ezaka, E.; Chen, H.; Farooque, A.A.; Raghavan, V.; Hu, J. Abstract: Background: This study explores the role of leguminous crops like lima bean in enhancing soil quality and ecosystem stability. Despite existing studies on agronomic aspects, there is a significant resea...
Article
Full-text available
Agriculture can ensure food security and enhance monetary benefits if practiced with modern technologies and supported with artificial intelligence (AI). Modern advancements in farming practices have revolutionized the production of food vegetation. However, crop cultivation faces several threats including insect and pest attacks and disease infect...
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Remote sensing (RS) techniques offer advantages over other methods for measuring soil properties, including large-scale coverage, a non-destructive nature, temporal monitoring, multispectral capabilities, and rapid data acquisition. This review highlights the different detection methods,types, parts, and applications of RS techniques in soil measur...
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Members of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates rely on desalination to produce water for domestic use. Desalination produces brine that may intrude into the aquifers to pollute the fresh groundwater because of the concentration gradient and groundwater pumping. Modeling the...
Preprint
Soil erosion causes fluctuations in potato ( Solanum tuberosum L) yield, deteriorates soil health, lowers profit margins for growers, and creates adverse environmental impacts. This study focuses on developing a decision support system to improve soil health, increase profitability for growers, and lower environmental risks. Two fields are selected...
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An operator of a wild blueberry harvester faces the fatigue of manually adjusting the height of the harvester’s head, considering spatial variations in plant height, fruit zone, and field topography affecting fruit yield. For stress-free harvesting of wild blueberries, a deep learning-supported machine vision control system has been developed to de...
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Climate change impacts all fields of life including agriculture. This study aimed to determine the historical and future climatic variations for the rainfed Prince Edward Island (PEI). Statistical downscaling model (SDSM), and support vector regression (SVR), multilayer perceptron (MLP), and random forest (RF) algorithms were applied to downscale c...
Article
Cover crops have been shown to be important integrated weed management tools. In addition to directly competing with weeds, cover crops can provide weed suppressive effects following incorporation through release of allelopathic compounds and/or changes to nutrient availability. Incorporation of a cover crop mixture may provide a synergistic or ant...
Preprint
Reanalysis and satellite-based rainfall packages are useful for monitoring the hydroclimatic extremes. These advanced tool can be used as early-warning system for decision-making during extreme events.. Hurricane Dorian and Fiona impacted the North Atlantic from September 6-9, 2019 and September 22-25, 2022, respectively. This study evaluated the C...
Article
Full-text available
Aerobic rice cultivation progresses water productivity, and it can save almost 50% of irrigation water compared to lowland rice with the appropriate development of genotypes and management practices. Two field trials were conducted during 2020, and 2021 seasons to determine the validation of different rice varieties under aerobic cultivation based...
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High-resolution multispectral imaging of agricultural fields is expensive but helpful in detecting subtle variations in plant health and stress symptoms before the appearance of visible indications. To aid precision agriculture (PA) practices, an innovative and inexpensive protocol for robust and timely monitoring of vegetation symptoms has been ev...
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Coronavirus disease (COVID)-19 is a viral and transferable disease caused by severe respiratory syndrome-coronavirus-2. It can spread through breathing droplets in human beings. It caused 5.32 million deaths around the world at the end of 2021. COVID-19 has caused several positive impacts as well, such as a reduction in air, water, and noise pollut...
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Non-arid region countries, including Canada, enjoy abundant water resources, while arid countries such as Qatar struggle to meet their water needs. However, climate change threats to water resources are similar for both climatic regions. Therefore, this article discusses water dimensions, security, and governance for these different regions, i.e.,...
Article
Improving fruit quality is important to wild blueberry producers. Plant debris like leaves and stems caused a reduction in fruit quality during mechanical harvesting. A debris detection system was developed using two Logitech C920 webcam cameras mounted before and after the blower fan on a commercial mechanical wild blueberry harvester. Images were...
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The production of wild blueberries (Vaccinium angustifolium) contributes 112.2 million dollars yearly to Canada’s revenue, which can be further increased by reducing harvest losses. A precise prediction of blueberry harvest losses is necessary to mitigate such losses. The performance of three machine learning (ML) algorithms was assessed to predict...
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Accurate land use land cover (LULC) classification is vital for the sustainable management of natural resources and to learn how the landscape is changing due to climate. For accurate and efficient LULC classification, high-quality datasets and robust classification methods are required. With the increasing availability of satellite data, geospatia...
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Hair fescue is a common perennial grass weed in wild blueberry fields in Nova Scotia, Canada and reduces yield if not adequately controlled. Hair fescue is typically managed with a broadcast propyzamide application which is costly for growers. Current research on the management of hair fescue in wild blueberry fields focuses on the development of a...
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This review article focuses on recent studies using hydrothermal carbonization (HTC) for producing hydrochar and its potential application as a solid fuel pellet. Due to the depletion of fossil fuels and increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the need for carbon-neutral fuel sources has increased. Another environmental concern relates to the ma...
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Land use and land cover (LULC) classification maps help understand the state and trends of agricultural production and provide insights for applications in environmental monitoring. One of the major downfalls of the LULC technique is inherently linked to its need for ground truth data to cross-validate maps. This paper aimed at evaluating the effic...
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Efficient bioresource management can alter soil biochemistry and soil physical properties, leading to reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agricultural fields. The objective of this study was to evaluate the role of organic amendments including biodigestate (BD), biochar (BC), and their combinations with inorganic fertilizer (IF) in increasi...
Article
The field performance of a newly developed novel smart variable-rate sprayer was evaluated. The sprayer uses convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for target detection and spot-applications of agrochemicals within potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) fields attacked by lamb's quarters (Chenopodium album L.) and corn spurry (Spergula arvensis L.) weeds and...
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Evapotranspiration is sensitive to climate change. The main objective of this study was to examine the response of reference evapotranspiration (ET0) under various climate change scenarios using artificial neural networks and the Canadian Earth System Model Second Generation (CanESM2). The Hargreaves method was used to calculate ET0 for western, ce...
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Dykelands are agricultural ground protected from coastal inundation by dyke infra-structure and constitute some of the most agriculturally productive lands in Nova Scotia. Between 2015 and 2019, Canada’s Annual Crop Inventory was used to characterize and estimate hectares of agricultural dykelands cultivated in Nova Scotia. The number of hectares o...
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Soil chemical properties can be improved by incorporating crop residues in soil and letting it decompose. This study explored the use of incorporating residues of cover crops for improvements in soil chemical properties including soil organic matter (SOM), soil pH, and the selected soil macro- and micronutrients in greenhouse and field trials. Fact...
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Mechanical harvesters with small box and semi-automated bin handling systems are increasingly being used for harvesting wild blueberries in Eastern Canada, and Northeastern, USA. However, their field capacity and performance have not been quantified and compared. Important measures of field capacity and efficiency for a traditional mechanical harve...