Data Fusion of Sentinel-2 Spectral and Meteorological Data for Field-Scale Sugarcane Biomass Prediction in Humid Tropical Mexico Using Machine Learning

Abstract

Yield estimation in sugarcane systems remains a major challenge in tropical regions due to the reliance on destructive, labor-intensive, and spatially limited field measurements. Although remote sensing has been widely used for crop monitoring, its predictive performance is often constrained when spectral information is used in isolation. This study proposes a data fusion framework integrating multitemporal Sentinel-2 spectral bands with meteorological variables to improve sugarcane biomass prediction under tropical conditions. A commercial field was monitored throughout the 2022–2023 growing season, and machine learning models, including random forest (RF), support vector machine (SVM), and multiple linear regression (MLR), were developed to estimate stem, foliage, and total biomass. To reduce potential spatial data leakage caused by spatial autocorrelation within the field, model performance was evaluated using Spatial Block Cross-Validation. Results showed that integrating spectral and meteorological data consistently improved predictive performance compared to spectral-only and weather-only scenarios. Spectral bands exhibited stronger relationships with biomass than derived vegetation indices, while maximum temperature and solar radiation were identified as key drivers of biomass variability. RF combined with spectral–weather fusion achieved the highest predictive performance, reaching R2 values up to 0.95, RMSE values as low as 5296.35, and rRMSE values close to 18% for stem biomass, consistently outperforming SVM and MLR. In contrast, spectral-only scenarios produced lower predictive accuracy and higher prediction errors across all biomass variables. This study provides one of the first field-scale implementations under humid tropical conditions in southeastern Mexico, where georeferenced yield data remain scarce.

Plant phenotyping relevance

Sentinel-2と気象データの融合および機械学習により、サトウキビの茎・葉・総バイオマスという植物形質を推定する手法を開発・比較検証しており、フェノタイピング手法が中心である。

Code and data availability

The paper's field biomass measurements, Sentinel-2 spectral extractions, and meteorological variables are stated to be available as Supplementary Data Spreadsheet S1, but no public URL or repository identifier is provided in the supplied blocks, so access requires contacting the authors or retrieving the supplement via

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