Global food demand has increased in tandem with the world’s growing population, prompting calls for a new sustainable agricultural method. The scarcity of fertile soil and the world’s agricultural land have also become major concerns. Soilless and microgreen farming combined with nanotechnology may provide a revolutionary solution as well as a more sustainable and productive alternative to conventional farming. In this review, we look at the potential of nanotechnology in soilless and microgreen farming. The available but limited nanotechnology approaches in soilless farming include: (1) Nutrients nanoparticles to minimize nutrient losses and improve nutrient uptake and bioavailability in crops; (2) nano-sensing to provide real-time detection of p H, temperature, as well as quantifying the amount of the nutrient, allowing desired conditions control; and (3) incorporation of nanoparticles to improve the quality of substrate culture as crop cultivation growing medium. Meanwhile, potential nanotechnology applications in soilless and microgreen farming include: (1) Plant trait improvement against environmental disease and stress through nanomaterial application; (2) plant nanobionics to alter or improve the function of the plant tissue or organelle; and (3) extending the shelf life of microgreens by impregnating nanoparticles on the packaging or other preservation method.

This research aims to predict dengue fever cases in Malaysia using machine learning techniques. A dataset consisting of weekly dengue cases at the state level in Malaysia from 2010 to 2016 was obtained from the Malaysia Open Data website and includes variables such as climate, geography, and demographics. Six different long short-term memory (LSTM) models were developed and compared for dengue prediction in Malaysia: LSTM, stacked LSTM (S-LSTM), LSTM with temporal attention (TA-LSTM), S-LSTM with temporal attention (STA-LSTM), LSTM with spatial attention (SA-LSTM), and S-LSTM with spatial attention (SSA-LSTM). The models were trained and evaluated on a dataset of monthly dengue cases in Malaysia from 2010 to 2016, with the task of predicting the number of dengue cases based on various climate, topographic, demographic, and land-use variables. The SSA-LSTM model, which used both stacked LSTM layers and spatial attention, performed the best, with an average root mean squared error (RMSE) of 3.17 across all lookback periods. When compared to three benchmark models (SVM, DT, ANN), the SSA-LSTM model had a significantly lower average RMSE. The SSA-LSTM model also performed well in different states in Malaysia, with RMSE values ranging from 2.91 to 4.55. When comparing temporal and spatial attention models, the spatial models generally performed better at predicting dengue cases. The SSA-LSTM model was also found to perform well at different prediction horizons, with the lowest RMSE at 4- and 5-month lookback periods. Overall, the results suggest that the SSA-LSTM model is effective at predicting dengue cases in Malaysia.

Large-scale mapping of date palm trees is vital for their consistent monitoring and sustainable management, considering their substantial commercial, environmental, and cultural value. This study presents an automatic approach for the large-scale mapping of date palm trees from very-high-spatial-resolution (VHSR) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) datasets, based on a deep learning approach. A U-Shape convolutional neural network (U-Net), based on a deep residual learning framework, was developed for the semantic segmentation of date palm trees. A comprehensive set of labeled data was established to enable the training and evaluation of the proposed segmentation model and increase its generalization capability. The performance of the proposed approach was compared with those of various state-of-the-art fully convolutional networks (FCNs) with different encoder architectures, including U-Net (based on VGG-16 backbone), pyramid scene parsing network, and two variants of DeepLab V3+. Experimental results showed that the proposed model outperformed other FCNs in the validation and testing datasets. The generalizability evaluation of the proposed approach on a comprehensive and complex testing dataset exhibited higher classification accuracy and showed that date palm trees could be automatically mapped from VHSR UAV images with an F-score, mean intersection over union, precision, and recall of 91%, 85%, 0.91, and 0.92, respectively. The proposed approach provides an efficient deep learning architecture for the automatic mapping of date palm trees from VHSR UAV-based images.

Agricultural drought is crucial in understanding the relationship to crop production functions which can be monitored using satellite remote sensors. The aim of this research is to combine temperature vegetation dryness index (TVDI) and normalized difference water index (NDWI) classifications for identifying drought areas in Chuping, Malaysia which has regularly recorded high temperatures. TVDI and NDWI are assessed using three images of the dry spell period in March for the years 2015, 2016 and 2017. NDWI value representing water content in vegetation decreases numerically to −0.39, −0.37 and −0.36 for the year 2015, 2016 and 2017. Normalized difference vegetation indices (NDVI) values representing vegetation health status in the given area for images of years 2015 to 2017 decreases significantly (p ≤ 0.05) from 0.50 to 0.35 respectively. Overall, TVDI in the Chuping area showed agricultural drought with an average value of 0.46. However, Kilang Gula Chuping area in Chuping showed a significant increase in dryness for all of the three years assessed with an average value of 0.70. When both TVDI and NDWI were assessed, significant clustering of spots in Chuping, Perlis for all the 3 years was identified where geographical local regressions of 0.84, 0.70 and 0.70 for the years 2015, 2016 and 2017 was determined. Furthermore, Moran’s I values revealed that the research area had a high I value of 0.63, 0.30 and 0.23 with respective Z scores of 17.80, 8.63 and 6.77 for the years 2015, 2016 and 2017, indicating that the cluster relationship is significant in the 95–99 percent confidence interval. Using both indices alone was sufficient to understand the drier spots of Chuping over 3 years. The findings of this research will be of interest to local agriculture authorities, like plantation and meteorology departments to understand drier areas in the state to evaluate water deficits severity and cloud seeding points during drought.