Jaber Rahimi

• PhD
• Research Scientist at Land-CRAFT (DK)/KIT Campus Alpin - IMK-IFU (DE)

Machine learning (ML), especially deep learning (DL), is gaining popularity in the agroecosystem modelling community due to its ability to improve the efficiency of computationally intensive tasks. By reviewing previous modelling studies using the PRISMA technique, we present several examples of ML applications in this domain. The potential of usin...

Pastoralism is a major way of life in the Sahelian and Sudanian (SaSu) zone of Africa, playing an important social-environmental role through food production and the use of suitable land for seasonal migrations (transhumance). Using Earth Observation (EO) data, we systematically analyze environmental factors—water access, soil properties, topograph...

Climate change significantly challenges smallholder mixed crop-livestock (MCL) systems in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), affecting food and feed production. This study enhances the SIMPLACE modeling framework by incorporating crop-vegetation-livestock models, which contribute to the development of sustainable agricultural practices in response to climat...

A complete understanding of the nexus between productivity and sustainability of agricultural production systems calls for a comprehensive assessment of the nitrogen budget (NB). In our study, data from the well-monitored Danish Agricultural Watershed Monitoring Program (LOOP-program; 2013–2019) is used for a quantitative inter-comparison of three...

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has seen remarkable population growth over the last century, outpacing other global regions and resulting in an over-reliance on food imports. In consequence, it has become heavily dependent on grain imports, making it vulnerable to trade disruptions (e.g., due to the Russia-Ukraine War). Here, we quan...

Crop residue management plays an important role in determining agricultural greenhouse gas emissions and related changes in soil carbon stocks. However, no publicly-available global dataset currently exists for how crop residues are managed. Here we present such a dataset, covering the period 1997–2021, on a 0.5° resolution grid. For each grid cell...

A major societal challenge is to produce sufficient food for a growing global population while simultaneously reducing agricultural nitrogen pollution to within safe environmental boundaries. Here we use spatially-resolved, process-based simulations of cereal cropping systems (at 0.5° resolution) to show how redistribution of nitrogen fertiliser us...

Introduction Cassava production is essential for food security in sub-Saharan Africa and serves as a major calorie-intake source in Nigeria. Estimating the yield gap in Nigeria is essential to indicate the most important limiting factors for production, and identify the yield gap hotspot areas. Secondly, these assessments may help set agendas in po...

Globally, organic soils of natural and semi-natural ecosystems have been considered as an important source of atmospheric nitrous oxide (N2O), a powerful greenhouse gas. However, we have little understanding of how and to what extent the magnitude of N2O emissions from such soils is mediated by variation in environmental controls. This knowledge is...

Climate change is increasingly putting milk production from cattle-based dairy systems in north sub-Saharan Africa (NSSA) under stress, threatening livelihoods and food security. Here we combine livestock heat stress frequency, dry matter feed production and water accessibility data to understand where environmental changes in NSSA’s drylands are j...

A multivariate bias correction based on N‐dimensional probability density function transform (MBCn) technique is applied to four different high‐resolution regional climate change simulations and key meteorological variables, namely precipitation, mean near‐surface air temperature, near‐surface maximum air temperature, near‐surface minimum air tempe...

Crop yield forecasting depends on many interactive factors, including crop genotype, weather, soil, and management practices. This study analyzes the performance of machine learning and deep learning methods for winter wheat yield prediction using an extensive dataset of weather, soil, and crop phenology variables in 271 counties across Germany fro...

We applied the process-based model, LandscapeDNDC, to estimate feed availability in the Sahelian and Sudanian agro-ecological zones of West Africa as a basis for calculating the regional Livestock Carrying Capacity (LCC). Comparison of the energy supply (S) from feed resources, including natural pasture, browse, and crop residues, with energy deman...

Crop yield forecasting depends on many interactive factors including crop genotype, weather, soil, and management practices. This study analyzes the performance of machine learning and deep learning methods for winter wheat yield prediction using extensive datasets of weather, soil, and crop phenology. We propose a convolutional neural network (CNN...

West African Sahelian and Sudanian ecosystems provide essential services to people and also play a significant role within the global carbon cycle. However, climate and land use are dynamically changing, and uncertainty remains with respect to how these changes will affect the potential of these regions to provide food and fodder resources or how t...

Many open questions and unresolved issues surround the topic of bias correction (BC) in climate change impact studies (CCIS). One question relates to the contribution of downscaling of climate change scenarios on the uncertainties in results obtained using impact models for agriculture. In particular, for large area or regional agricultural impact...

West African Sahelian and Sudanian ecosystems are providing essential services to people and also play a significant role within the global carbon cycle. However, climate and land use are dynamically changing and it remains uncertain how these changes will affect the potential of these regions for providing food and fodder resources or the biospher...

Climate change-induced increases in temperature and humidity are predicted to impact East African food systems, but the extent to which heat stress negatively affects livestock production in this region is poorly understood. Here we use ERA‐Interim reanalysis data to show that the frequency of ‘Severe/Danger’ heat events for dairy cattle, beef catt...

Many open questions and unresolved issues surround the topic of bias correction (BC) in climate change impact studies (CCIS). One question relates to the contribution of downscaling of climate change scenarios on the uncertainties in results obtained using impact models for agriculture. In particular, for large area or regional agricultural impact...

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is home to approximately ¼ of the global livestock population, which in the last 60 years has increased by factors of 2.5-4 times for cattle, goats and sheep. An important resource for pastoralists, most livestock live in semi-arid and arid environments , where they roam during the day and are kept in enclosures (or bomas)...

This study focuses on heat stress conditions for dairy cattle production in West Africa under current and future climatic conditions. After testing the accuracy of the dynamically downscaled climate datasets for simulating the historical daily maximum temperature (Tmax) and relative humidity (RH) in West Africa for 50 meteorological stations, we us...

Climate change is arguably one of the most important challenges affecting different aspects of human life and the environment. The current research is an effort to assess the possible impact of climate change on precipitation, temperature, and consequently climate zones over Iran, based on the Köppen–Geiger climate classification scheme. To this en...

https://hdl.handle.net/10568/107764

Climate change is known as one of the key challenges of the 21st century for sustainable agricultural development over Southwest Asia. However, not much is known about the way that climate changes might affect precipitation, temperature, and climate zones as their consequence over Southwest Asia. Here we have analysed probable changes in modified T...

During recent years, various studies have focused on investigating the direct and indirect impacts of climate changes in Iran while the noteworthy fact is the achievement gained by these researches. Furthermore, what should be taken into consideration is whether these studies have been able to provide appropriate opportunities for improving further...

Late spring frosts (LSFs) play a key role in the evaluation of climate suitability for agricultural and horticultural crop production and are considered to be one of the main components of food security. It is expected that future climate change will affect the occurrence of LSFs and its damages. In order to quantify these changes, this study aims...

Iran is characterized by an extremely diversified climate, ranging from extra-arid to per-humid type. The main reasons are (a) vast extension of latitude, (b) stretching mountains and tremendous changes in altitude across the country, and finally (c) the position of the land considering seas and adjacent/far water. In this chapter, the effect of th...

Frost damage, especially in spring, can have profound effects on agricultural and horticultural crops so that in some years, Iranian insurance companies have to pay millions of dollars of cost to the farmers. It seems that the costs tend to change due to changing in frost features under future climate scenarios. Therefore, the purpose of the study...

Alternatively, to other studies that used parametric distributions (e.g. Gamma) in the estimation of the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), this study aims to apply a nonparametric method based on Kernel Density Estimator (KDE) for calculating the SPI. Results of the proposed method were compared with the ones from the most widely used paramet...

The late spring frost (LSF), as one of the main climatic disasters, has significant negative impacts on agricultural and horticultural crops production. It is expected that the features of its occurrence will be altered by climate change and global warming. Hence, the present study was performed to quantify these changes under two scenarios of A2 a...

Daily minimum air temperature data are greatly needed in climatic studies of first-fall and last-spring frosts, frost periods, evaluation and improvement of crop production potentials, and eventually their effects upon food security. Despite the fact that climate stations, set up at high elevations play important roles in accurate estimate of tempe...

Groundwater resources play central role in meeting domestic and agricultural demands of residents in arid regions. Owing to rapid urbanization, water use and land use has changed considerably. Overexploitation of wells posed a huge burden on available water resources. Degradation of water resources along with an increase of salinity has adversely a...

Drought is a natural disaster that has always had a severe impact on agriculture, especially rain-fed agriculture. Many studies have indicated that different indices, for example the standardized precipitation index (SPI), do not show acceptable efficiency in quantifying agricultural drought. In the current study, an index was utilized that is the...

One major characteristic of the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) is its flexibility to be calculated in a variety of time scales and hence being aware of different types of droughts. However, various time scales may result in confusion of the water resources’ researchers, decision makers and users in identifying and specifying drought periods...

Estimation of Effective Precipitation (Pe) in dryland areas is an essential element of water resources. It represents the amount of total precipitation which is available in the area of crop root zone to meet the needs of evapotranspiration. The current study aimed to compare different approaches for estimating Pe in different climatic zones of Ira...

Each year, frost causes extensive damage to all aspects of agricultural production. Therefore, quantification of frost risk occurrence is one of the most important factors in implementing agricultural insurance policies. In this study, a hierarchical algorithm for detecting advection and radiation frost has been presented using data of a network co...

High-resolution precipitation datasets are used for numerous applications. However, depending on the procedures for obtaining these products, such as number of observations, quality checking, error-correction procedures, and interpolation techniques, they include many uncertainties. Therefore, the accuracy of these products needs to be evaluated ov...

Abstract Extended Abstract Introduction Among factors affecting crop production, especially rainfed crops, the rainfall and its distribution during crop season have a significant role. In addition, all the precipitation that falls during the growing season does not have the same effect on crop yield, and is not used in agriculture. So, quantificati...

In order to better understand the effect associated with global climate change on Iran’s climate condition, it is important to quantify possible shifts in different climatic types in the future. To this end, monthly mean minimum and maximum temperature, and precipitation from 181 synoptic meteorological stations (average 1970–2005) have been collec...

The estimation of effective rainfall is an important technique for exploiting the rainwater resource, planning for irrigation in irrigated agriculture, and determining changes in dryland wheat products for country’s macroeconomic management. In this research, a two-layer soil-water balance model based on a new approach has been formulated to estima...

Air pollution is one indication of Citizens growth, population increase, excessive use of fossil fuel resources, lack of utilizing environmentally friendly technologies and most importantly lack of proper environmental management. Establishment more than ten million people and excessive concentration of industries and factories, along with the geog...

Many researches done during the last twenty years has been detected a strong relationship between urban microclimate and precipitation. Urbanization is increasing in parallel with the increase in population. As a result of urbanization and population increase, the energy consumption has also been increasing due to heating, traffic and industrializa...

Air pollution is one of the environmental problems in large cities in the world. In present, increasing urbanization and development of economic and industrial activities regardless of their impact assessment on the environment has caused urban air pollution and hazards caused by emissions of different pollutants. Problem of air pollution in Tehran...