UniCrop: A Universal, Multi-Source Data Engineering Pipeline for Scalable Crop Yield Prediction

TL;DR

UniCrop is a versatile data pipeline that automates multi-source environmental data processing for scalable crop yield prediction, improving model accuracy and operational deployment.

Contribution

It introduces a universal, reusable data engineering framework that automates data acquisition, cleaning, and feature reduction for crop yield prediction across regions and crops.

Findings

LightGBM achieved RMSE = 465.1 kg/ha and R^2 = 0.6576

Ensemble of baseline models improved accuracy to RMSE = 463.2 kg/ha and R^2 = 0.6604

UniCrop reduces data engineering effort and enhances scalability in crop yield modeling.

Abstract

Accurate crop yield prediction relies on diverse data streams, including satellite, meteorological, soil, and topographic information. However, despite rapid advances in machine learning, existing approaches remain crop- or region-specific and require data engineering efforts. This limits scalability, reproducibility, and operational deployment. This study introduces UniCrop, a universal and reusable data pipeline designed to automate the acquisition, cleaning, harmonisation, and engineering of multi-source environmental data for crop yield prediction. For any given location, crop type, and temporal window, UniCrop automatically retrieves, harmonises, and engineers over 200 environmental variables (Sentinel-1/2, MODIS, ERA5-Land, NASA POWER, SoilGrids, and SRTM), reducing them to a compact, analysis-ready feature set utilising a structured feature reduction workflow with minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR). To validate, UniCrop was applied to a rice yield dataset comprising 557 field observations. Using only the selected 15 features, four baseline machine learning models (LightGBM, Random Forest, Support Vector Regression, and Elastic Net) were trained. LightGBM achieved the best single-model performance (RMSE = 465.1 kg/ha, $R^2 = 0.6576$), while a constrained ensemble of all baselines further improved accuracy (RMSE = 463.2 kg/ha, $R^2 = 0.6604$). UniCrop contributes a scalable and transparent data-engineering framework that addresses the primary bottleneck in operational crop yield modelling: the preparation of consistent and harmonised multi-source data. By decoupling data specification from implementation and supporting any crop, region, and time frame through simple configuration updates, UniCrop provides a practical foundation for scalable agricultural analytics. The code and implementation documentation are shared in https://github.com/CoDIS-Lab/UniCrop.