{
  "abstract": "In-season, pre-harvest crop yield forecasts are essential for enhancing transparency in commodity markets and improving food security. They play a key role in increasing resilience to climate change and extreme events and thus contribute to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal 2 of zero hunger. Pre-harvest crop yield forecasting is a complex task, as several interacting factors contribute to yield formation, including in-season weather variability, extreme events, long-term climate change, soil, pests, diseases and farm management decisions. Several modeling approaches have been employed to capture complex interactions among such predictors and crop yields. Prior research for in-season, pre-harvest crop yield forecasting has primarily been case-study based, which makes it difficult to compare modeling approaches and measure progress systematically. To address this gap, we introduce CY-Bench (Crop Yield Benchmark), a comprehensive dataset and benchmark to forecast maize and wheat yields at a global scale. CY-Bench was conceptualized and developed within the Machine Learning team of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgML) in collaboration with agronomists, climate scientists, and machine learning researchers. It features publicly available sub-national yield statistics and relevant predictors—such as weather data, soil characteristics, and remote sensing indicators—that have been pre-processed, standardized, and harmonized across spatio-temporal scales. With CY-Bench, we aim to: (i) establish a standardized framework for developing and evaluating data-driven models across diverse farming systems in more than 25 countries across six continents; (ii) enable robust and reproducible model comparisons that address real-world operational challenges; (iii) provide an openly accessible dataset to the earth system science and machine learning communities, facilitating research on time series forecasting, domain adaptation, and online learning. The dataset (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11502142, (Paudel et al., 2025a)) and accompanying code (https://github.com/WUR-AI/AgML-CY-Bench, (Paudel et al., 2025b))) are openly available to support the continuous development of advanced data driven models for crop yield forecasting to enhance decision-making on food security.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [
    "Wageningen University & Research (Wageningen, Netherlands)",
    "Artificial Intelligence Group, Wageningen University and Research, P.O. Box 16, Wageningen, 6700 AA, the Netherlands",
    "Chair of Data Science in Earth Observation, Technical University of Munich, Arcisstraße 21, Munich, 80333, Germany",
    "Department of Agronomy, Purdue University, 915 Mitch Daniels Blvd, West Lafayette, IN 47907, United States",
    "Department of Soil Science, University of Manitoba, 13 Freedman Crescent, Winnipeg, MB R3T 2N2, Canada",
    "Department of Geographical Sciences, University of Maryland, 7251 Preinkert Drive, Collega Park, MD 20742, United States",
    "GISS Impacts Group, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, 535 West 116th Street, Mail Code 4312, New York, NY 10027, United States",
    "College of Computing, Mohammed VI Polytechnic University, Lot 660, Benguerir, 43150, Morocco",
    "Institute for Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1105, Amsterdam, 1081 HV, the Netherlands",
    "Department of Climate Resilience, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, P.O. Box 60 12 03, Potsdam, 4412, Germany",
    "Department of Civil Engineering, University of Manitoba, 15 Gillson Street, Winnipeg, MB R3T 5V6, Canada",
    "Image Processing Laboratory, Universitat de València, C/Catedràtic Agustín Escardino Benlloch, 9, València, 46980, Spain",
    "Laboratory of Geo-Information Science and Remote Sensing, Wageningen University and Research, P.O. Box 47, Wageningen, 6700 AA, the Netherlands",
    "Seidor Consulting, Carrer dels Provençals 44, Barcelona, 08019, Spain",
    "West and Central Africa Region Hub, International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics, P.O. Box 320, Bamako, Mali",
    "Natural Resources Management, International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, P.O. Box 30677, Nairobi, 00100, Kenya",
    "Agriculture and Food, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), 147 Underwood Av, Perth, WA 6014, Australia",
    "Simulation and Data Science- Multiscale modelling and Forecasting, Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research, Eberswalder Straße 84, Müncheberg, 15374, Germany",
    "Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communications, Texas A&M University, 600 John Kimbrough Blvd, College Station, TX 77843-2116, United States",
    "Department of Computational Hydrosystems, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Permoserstraße 15, Leipzig, 04318, Germany",
    "Fincons s.p.a, Via Torri Bianche 10, Vimercate, 20871, Italy",
    "Earth Observation and Environmental Informatics, Wageningen University and Research, P.O. Box 47, Wageningen, 6700 AA, the Netherlands",
    "Chair of Digital Agriculture, Technical University of Munich, Liesel-Beckmann-Straße 2, Freising, 85354, Germany"
  ],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 33,
  "authors": [
    {
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        0
      ],
      "name": "Michiel Kallenberg",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-4661-6674"
    },
    {
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        1
      ],
      "name": "Dilli Paudel",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-4080-4276"
    },
    {
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        2
      ],
      "name": "Stella Ofori-Ampofo",
      "orcid": "0009-0007-5374-2031"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        1
      ],
      "name": "Hilmy Baja",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-6995-3817"
    },
    {
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        1
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      "name": "Ron van Bree",
      "orcid": "0009-0000-6365-6996"
    },
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        1
      ],
      "name": "Aike Potze",
      "orcid": "0009-0008-7812-3293"
    },
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        3
      ],
      "name": "Pratishtha Poudel",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-4261-310X"
    },
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      ],
      "name": "Abdelrahman Saleh"
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      ],
      "name": "Weston Anderson",
      "orcid": "0009-0002-5594-487X"
    },
    {
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      ],
      "name": "Malte von Bloh",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-2762-5089"
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      "name": "Andres Castellano"
    },
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      "name": "Oumnia Ennaji",
      "orcid": "0009-0009-8216-2962"
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        8
      ],
      "name": "Raed Hamed",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-2243-3109"
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    {
      "affs": [
        9
      ],
      "name": "Rahel Laudien",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-5859-4030"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        10
      ],
      "name": "Donghoon Lee"
    },
    {
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        11
      ],
      "name": "Inti Luna",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-2212-9767"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        12
      ],
      "name": "Dainius Masiliū̄nas",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-5654-1277"
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    {
      "affs": [
        13
      ],
      "name": "Michele Meroni",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-2976-603X"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        14
      ],
      "name": "Janet Mumo Mutuku"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        15
      ],
      "name": "Siyabusa Mkuhlani",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-7872-2036"
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    {
      "affs": [
        16
      ],
      "name": "Jonathan Richetti",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-2675-3425"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        6
      ],
      "name": "Alex C. Ruane",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-5582-9217"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        5
      ],
      "name": "Ritvik Sahajpal",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-6418-289X"
    },
    {
      "affs": [
        5
      ],
      "name": "Guanyuan Shuai",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-0833-3718"
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    {
      "affs": [
        1
      ],
      "name": "Vasileios Sitokonstantinou",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-5506-2872"
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    {
      "name": "Rogério de Souza Nóia Júnior",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-4096-7588"
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      "name": "Amit Kumar Srivastava",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-8219-4854"
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    {
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        18
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      "name": "Robert Strong",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-5279-4808"
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      "name": "Lily‐belle Sweet",
      "orcid": "0000-0001-9971-6102"
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      "name": "Petar Vojnović",
      "orcid": "0009-0008-4363-7278"
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      "name": "Allard J. W. de Wit",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-5517-6404"
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      "name": "Maximilian Zachow",
      "orcid": "0000-0002-0525-7900"
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    {
      "affs": [
        1
      ],
      "name": "Ioannis N. Athanasiadis",
      "orcid": "0000-0003-2764-0078"
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  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/4qkc4jng1bvmy.bib",
  "cited_by": 10,
  "doi": "10.5194/essd-18-3997-2026",
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  "id": "4qkc4jng1bvmy",
  "issns": [
    "1866-3508",
    "1866-3516"
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  "landing_url": "https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-18-3997-2026",
  "language": "en",
  "licence": "CC-BY",
  "licence_label": "CC BY",
  "licence_source": "journal",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [
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  "pdf_url": "https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/18/3997/2026/essd-18-3997-2026.pdf",
  "pmcid": null,
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  "published": "2026-06-11",
  "publisher": "Copernicus Publications",
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/4qkc4jng1bvmy.ris",
  "sources": [
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  "subjects": [
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      "field": "biology",
      "origin": "openalex:1110|Smart Agriculture and AI",
      "subfield": "plant-biology"
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  "title": "CY-Bench: a comprehensive benchmark dataset for sub-national crop yield forecasting",
  "title_text": "CY-Bench: a comprehensive benchmark dataset for sub-national crop yield forecasting",
  "type": "peer-reviewed",
  "updated_at": "2026-11-09T13:21:08Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/4qkc4jng1bvmy",
  "venue": "Earth system science data",
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