The rise in extreme weather events due to climate change challenges the balance of supply and demand for high-quality agricultural products. In Taiwan, greenhouse cultivation, a key agricultural method, faces increasing summer temperatures and higher operational costs. This study presents the innovative AI-powered greenhouse environmental control system (AI-GECS), which integrates customized gridded weather forecasts, microclimate forecasts, crop physiological indicators, and automated greenhouse operations. This system utilizes a Multi-Model Super Ensemble (MMSE) forecasting framework to generate accurate hourly gridded weather forecasts. Building upon these forecasts, combined with real-time in-greenhouse meteorological data, the AI-GECS employs a hybrid deep learning model, CLSTM-CNN-BP, to project the greenhouse’s microclimate on an hourly basis. This predictive capability allows for the assessment of crop physiological indicators within the anticipated microclimate, thereby enabling preemptive adjustments to cooling systems to mitigate adverse conditions. All processes run on a cloud-based platform, automating operations for enhanced environmental control. The AI-GECS was tested in an experimental greenhouse at the Taiwan Agricultural Research Institute, showing strong alignment with greenhouse management needs. This system offers a resource-efficient, labor-saving solution, fusing microclimate forecasts with crop models to support sustainable agriculture. This study represents critical advancements in greenhouse automation, addressing the agricultural challenges of climate variability.
Agriculture is extremely vulnerable to climate change. Greenhouse farming is recognized as a promising measure against climate change. Nevertheless, greenhouse farming frequently encounters environmental adversity, especially greenhouses built to protect against typhoons. Short-term microclimate prediction is challenging because meteorological variables are strongly interconnected and change rapidly. Therefore, this study proposes a water-centric smart microclimate-control system (SMCS) that fuses system dynamics and machine-learning techniques in consideration of the internal hydro-meteorological process to regulate the greenhouse micro-environment within the canopy for environmental cooling with improved resource-use efficiency. SMCS was assessed by in situ data collected from a tomato greenhouse in Taiwan. The results demonstrate that the proposed SMCS could save 66.8% of water and energy (electricity) used for early spraying during the entire cultivation period compared to the traditional greenhouse-spraying system based mainly on operators’ experiences. The proposed SMCS suggests a practicability niche in machine-learning-enabled greenhouse automation with improved crop productivity and resource-use efficiency. This will increase agricultural resilience to hydro-climate uncertainty and promote resource preservation, which offers a pathway towards carbon-emission mitigation and a sustainable water–energy–food nexus.