Ming Pan

Beizhang Chen, Jinming Liang, Zheng Xiong et al.

Accurately detecting rice flowering time is crucial for timely pollination in hybrid rice seed production. This not only enhances pollination efficiency but also ensures higher yields. However, due to the complexity of field environments and the characteristics of rice spikelets, such as their small size and short flowering period, automated and precise recognition remains challenging. To address this, this study proposes a rice spikelet flowering recognition method based on an improved YOLOv8 object detection model. First, a Bidirectional Feature Pyramid Network (BiFPN) replaces the original PANet structure to enhance feature fusion and improve multi-scale feature utilization. Second, to boost small object detection, a p2 small-object detection head is added, using finer feature mapping to reduce feature loss commonly seen in detecting small targets. Given the lack of publicly available datasets for rice spikelet flowering in field conditions, a high-resolution RGB camera and data augmentation techniques are used to construct a dedicated dataset, providing reliable support for model training and testing. Experimental results show that the improved YOLOv8s-p2 model achieves an mAP@0.5 of 65.9%, precision of 67.6%, recall of 61.5%, and F1-score of 64.41%, representing improvements of 3.10%, 8.40%, 10.80%, and 9.79%, respectively, over the baseline YOLOv8. The model also runs at 69 f/s on the test set, meeting practical application requirements. Overall, the improved YOLOv8s-p2 offers high accuracy and speed, providing an effective solution for automated monitoring in hybrid rice seed production.

Haoyu Ji, Yalan Song, Tadd Bindas et al.

To track rapid changes within our water sector, Global Water Models (GWMs) need to realistically represent hydrologic systems' response patterns - such as baseflow fraction - but are hindered by their limited ability to learn from data. Here we introduce a high-resolution physics-embedded big-data-trained model as a breakthrough in reliably capturing characteristic hydrologic response patterns ('signatures') and their shifts. By realistically representing the long-term water balance, the model revealed widespread shifts - up to ~20% over 20 years - in fundamental green-blue-water partitioning and baseflow ratios worldwide. Shifts in these response patterns, previously considered static, contributed to increasing flood risks in northern mid-latitudes, heightening water supply stresses in southern subtropical regions, and declining freshwater inputs to many European estuaries, all with ecological implications. With more accurate simulations at monthly and daily scales than current operational systems, this next-generation model resolves large, nonlinear seasonal runoff responses to rainfall ('elasticity') and streamflow flashiness in semi-arid and arid regions. These metrics highlight regions with management challenges due to large water supply variability and high climate sensitivity, but also provide tools to forecast seasonal water availability. This capability newly enables global-scale models to deliver reliable and locally relevant insights for water management.

Wen-Ping Tsai, Dapeng Feng, Ming Pan et al.

The behaviors and skills of models in many geosciences (e.g., hydrology and ecosystem sciences) strongly depend on spatially-varying parameters that need calibration. A well-calibrated model can reasonably propagate information from observations to unobserved variables via model physics, but traditional calibration is highly inefficient and results in non-unique solutions. Here we propose a novel differentiable parameter learning (dPL) framework that efficiently learns a global mapping between inputs (and optionally responses) and parameters. Crucially, dPL exhibits beneficial scaling curves not previously demonstrated to geoscientists: as training data increases, dPL achieves better performance, more physical coherence, and better generalizability (across space and uncalibrated variables), all with orders-of-magnitude lower computational cost. We demonstrate examples that learned from soil moisture and streamflow, where dPL drastically outperformed existing evolutionary and regionalization methods, or required only ~12.5% of the training data to achieve similar performance. The generic scheme promotes the integration of deep learning and process-based models, without mandating reimplementation.