Cited by 39Bioenergy crop production and managementSoil and Land Suitability AnalysisRemote Sensing in Agriculture

Machine learning based estimation of land productivity in the contiguous US using biophysical predictors

Open access
Yang, Pan, Zhao, Qiankun, Cai, Ximing·2020·Environmental Research Letters

Abstract

Estimation of land productivity and availability is necessary to predict land production potential, especially for the emerging bioenergy crop production, which may compete land with food crop production. This study provides land productivity estimates in the contiguous United States (CONUS) through a machine learning approach. Land productivity is defined as the potential in producing agricultural outputs given biophysical properties including climate, soil, and land slope. The land productivity is approximated by the potential yields of six major crops in the CONUS, i.e. corn, soybean, winter wheat, spring wheat, cotton, and alfalfa. This quantitative relationship is then applied to estimating the availability of marginal land for bioenergy crop production in the CONUS. Furthermore, the levels of uncertainties associated with land productivity and marginal land estimates are quantified and discussed. Based on the modeling results, the total marginal land of the CONUS ranges 55.0–172.8 mha, but the 95% inter-percentile distance of the estimated productivity index reaches up to 60% of its expected value in data-scarce regions. Finally, in a cross-check analysis, marginal lands estimated based on biophysical criteria are found to be comparable to those based on an economic criterion.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1088/1748-9326/ab865f

Cites

65 of 65 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Yang et al. (2020) did country scale (USA) analysis to delineate marginal land for bioenergy crop production based on remote sensed data.

    “Yang et al. (2020) did country scale (USA) analysis to delineate marginal land for bioenergy crop production based on remote sensed data.”

    From Concepts of agricultural marginal lands and their utilisation: a review (2023) · cites this paper as Yang et al. (2020)

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Yang, P., Zhao, Q., & Cai, X.
Affiliations
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (US)
Corresponding author
Cai, Ximing
Venue
Environmental Research Letters
Published
2020-06-30
Volume
15
Issue
7
Pages
074013
ISSN
1748-9326 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3014365001
Cited by
39
References
65
Citations by year
2026: 2 · 2025: 3 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 7
FWCI
8.41
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Environmental Research Letters (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion)
  • OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) (submittedVersion)
Funders
Office of Science (DE-SC0018420)
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Agronomy and Crop Science › Bioenergy crop production and management
  • Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law › Soil and Land Suitability Analysis
  • Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecology › Remote Sensing in Agriculture
Keywords
land productivity, marginal land, energy crops, land availability, crop yield potential, land suitability, maize, soybean, wheat, cotton, alfalfa, uncertainty quantification, land use competition, contiguous United States

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review