Temperature and humidity, along with concentrations of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, are critical environmental factors that significantly influence the growth and health of pigs within porcine habitats. The ability to accurately predict these environmental variables in pig houses is pivotal, as it provides crucial decision-making support for the precise and targeted regulation of the internal environmental conditions. This approach ensures an optimal living environment, essential for the well-being and healthy development of the pigs. The existing methodologies for forecasting environmental factors in pig houses are currently hampered by issues of low predictive accuracy and significant fluctuations in environmental conditions. To address these challenges in this study, a hybrid model incorporating the improved dung beetle algorithm (DBO), temporal convolutional networks (TCNs), and gated recurrent units (GRUs) is proposed for the prediction and optimization of environmental factors in pig barns. The model enhances the global search capability of DBO by introducing the Osprey Eagle optimization algorithm (OOA). The hybrid model uses the optimization capability of DBO to initially fit the time-series data of environmental factors, and subsequently combines the long-term dependence capture capability of TCNs and the non-linear sequence processing capability of GRUs to accurately predict the residuals of the DBO fit. In the prediction of ammonia concentration, the OTDBO–TCN–GRU model shows excellent performance with mean absolute error (MAE), mean square error (MSE), and coefficient of determination (R²) of 0.0474, 0.0039, and 0.9871, respectively. Compared with the DBO–TCN–GRU model, OTDBO–TCN–GRU achieves significant reductions of 37.2% and 66.7% in MAE and MSE, respectively, while the R² value is improved by 2.5%. Compared with the OOA model, the OTDBO–TCN–GRU achieved 48.7% and 74.2% reductions in the MAE and MSE metrics, respectively, while the R² value improved by 3.6%. In addition, the improved OTDBO–TCN–GRU model has a prediction error of less than 0.3 mg/m³ for environmental gases compared with other algorithms, and has less influence on sudden environmental changes, which shows the robustness and adaptability of the model for environmental prediction. Therefore, the OTDBO–TCN–GRU model, as proposed in this study, optimizes the predictive performance of environmental factor time series and offers substantial decision support for environmental control in pig houses.

Soil moisture critically influences crop growth, especially in dryland environments. Precise agricultural management requires real-time monitoring of stratified soil moisture and assessment of crops’ daily water needs. We aim to provide low-cost, high-throughput information acquisition services for dryland regions with underdeveloped infrastructure and offer scientific support for sustainable water resource management. We used UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) with multi-spectral sensors for routine maize monitoring, capturing leaf reflectance. Constructing vegetation indices, we quantified the relationship between leaf water content and surface soil moisture, using the Biswas model to predict deep soil moisture distribution. We used UVAs to monitor crop height and calculated the daily water demand for the entire growth period of corn using the Penman Montes equation. We found an R² of 0.8603, RMSE of 2.455%, and MAE of 2.099% between NDVI and canopy leaf water content. A strong linear correlation (R² = 0.7510) between canopy leaf water content and soil moisture was observed in the top 20 cm of soil. Deep soil moisture inversion from the top 20 cm soil moisture showed an R² of 0.9984, with RE mostly under 10%, but exceeding 20% at 120 cm depth. We also constructed a maize height model aligning with a sigmoidal growth curve (R² = 0.9724). Maize’s daily water demand varied from 0.7121 to 9.4263 mm, exhibiting a downward-opening parabolic trend. Integration of rainfall and soil water data allowed for dynamic irrigation adjustments, mitigating drought and water stress effects on crops. We highlighted UAV multi-spectral imaging’s effectiveness in monitoring crop water needs, facilitating quick daily water requirement estimations. Our work offers a scientific foundation for managing maize cultivation in drylands, enhancing water resource utilization.

With the advancement of machine vision technology, pig face recognition has garnered significant attention as a key component in the establishment of precision breeding models. In order to explore non-contact individual pig recognition, this study proposes a lightweight pig face feature learning method based on attention mechanism and two-stage transfer learning. Using a combined approach of online and offline data augmentation, both the self-collected dataset from Shanxi Agricultural University's grazing station and public datasets underwent enhancements in terms of quantity and quality. YOLOv8 was employed for feature extraction and fusion of pig face images. The Coordinate Attention (CA) module was integrated into the YOLOv8 model to enhance the extraction of critical pig face features. Fine-tuning of the feature network was conducted to establish a pig face feature learning model based on two-stage transfer learning. The YOLOv8 model achieved a mean average precision (mAP) of 97.73% for pig face feature learning, surpassing lightweight models such as EfficientDet, SDD, YOLOv5, YOLOv7-tiny, and swin_transformer by 0.32, 1.23, 1.56, 0.43 and 0.14 percentage points, respectively. The YOLOv8-CA model’s mAP reached 98.03%, a 0.3 percentage point improvement from before its addition. Furthermore, the mAP of the two-stage transfer learning-based pig face feature learning model was 95.73%, exceeding the backbone network and pre-trained weight models by 10.92 and 3.13 percentage points, respectively. The lightweight pig face feature learning method, based on attention mechanism and two-stage transfer learning, effectively captures unique pig features. This approach serves as a valuable reference for achieving non-contact individual pig recognition in precision breeding.