Liangliang Yu

Inner Mongolia is the dominant spring wheat production area in northern China and a core commodity grain supply base. Against the background of global warming, mete-orological disasters, such as drought, dry-hot winds, and frost, are occurring more frequently and with increasing overlap, posing a threat to stable spring wheat produc-tion. This study covers the period 1961–2020 and draws on observational data from 107 meteorological stations alongside agricultural and socioeconomic data. Using the Standardized Precipitation Evapotranspiration Index, dry-hot wind index, and frost index, we constructed a reginal disaster index system encompassing drought, dry-hot winds, and frost. Comprehensive risk assessment and zoning were conducted across four dimensions: hazard, exposure, vulnerability, and disaster prevention and mitiga-tion capacity. The results showed that: (1) Temporally, the study area exhibited a sig-nificant warm and dry trend, with intensifying aridification across all growth periods and an abrupt change concentrated in the 1990s. The occurrence range of dry-hot wind trended upward, while that of frost trended downward. (2) Spatially, the comprehen-sive hazard presented a pattern dominated by drought-dry hot wind in the west, drought-frost in the east, and multiple disasters overlapping in the central part. (3) High exposure occurred in major production areas, such as eastern Hulunbuir, Xing'an League, and Bayannur, while vulnerability followed the pattern central part > eastern > western regions. (4) Comprehensive risk analysis showed that sub-high and high-risk areas were concentrated in central Xilingol League and parts of Hulunbuir, whereas low- and sub-low-risk areas occurred in irrigated agricultural regions west of Baotou. The zoning results were consistent with the spatial distributions of yield reduction rate and vulnerability. This study clarifies the spatiotemporal evolution and risk differen-tiation mechanisms of meteorological disasters affecting spring wheat in Inner Mon-golia, providing a scientific basis for disaster prevention, mitigation, and cli-mate-adaptive spring wheat production.

Accurate extraction of crop planting structures is important for crop area and yield estimation, but complex and fragmented cropping patterns with overlapping phenology in the Hetao Irrigation District hinder reliable crop discrimination. This study proposes a hierarchical workflow that integrates vegetation masking with multi-source feature optimization for crop mapping. First, dual-temporal Sentinel-2 imagery (May and August) is used to generate a vegetation region-of-interest(ROI) mask via Otsu thresholding applied to the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), combined with pixel-wise maximum-value fusion to reduce phenology-driven omissions and background interference. Second, within the vegetation mask, Sentinel-2 spectral, vegetation-index, and texture features are combined with Sentinel-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) backscatter and SAR texture features to construct a multi-source feature set. Random Forest(RF) feature-importance ranking is used to select an effective feature subset, and four classifiers (RF, support vector machine (SVM), eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), and convolutional neural network (CNN)) are compared under the same training/validation setting. The vegetation extraction achieves an overall accuracy of 91% (Kappa = 0.80). Using Sentinel-2 features only, the optimized subset with CNN attains the best performance (overall accuracy = 95%, Kappa = 0.93). Adding Sentinel-1 SAR texture features provides an additional improvement (overall accuracy = 96%, Kappa = 0.94), particularly for classes prone to confusion in fragmented plots. Area proportions derived from the final map are consistent with statistical yearbook data (percentage errors: maize 3.45%, sunflower 2.66%, wheat 0.11%, tomato 0.92%) under the study conditions. This workflow supports practical crop-structure monitoring in complex irrigation districts.

Soil salinity mapping in heterogeneous irrigation districts faces a dual challenge: the high dimensionality of hyperspectral data leads to redundancy, while the scarcity of ground-truth samples restricts the generalization of data-driven models. Traditional regression methods often struggle to capture non-linear spectral responses under such “small-sample” conditions. To address these limitations, this study proposes a semi-supervised retrieval framework coupling Optimal Band Combination Analysis (OBCA) with a Spectral Wasserstein GAN with Gradient Penalty (S-WGAN-GP). We constructed a robust feature set via cross-scenario evaluation and developed a rigorous “Uncertainty-Aware Filtering” protocol to screen synthetic samples generated by a teacher mechanism. The OBCA screening revealed that salinity-sensitive features are robustly clustered in the Green (550–570 nm) and Near-Infrared (NIR, 880–950 nm) regions, with NIR bands demonstrating superior stability across different sites. The proposed S-WGAN-GP successfully densified the feature manifold by generating 1186 high-fidelity synthetic samples. By incorporating these augmented data, the inversion accuracy was substantially improved: the R² of the optimal SVR model increased from 0.36 (baseline) to 0.60 (+66.7%), and the RMSE decreased from 7.06 to 5.57 dSm⁻¹. This study confirms that physically constrained generative augmentation, when combined with rigorous quality control, effectively bridges the distribution gap in limited datasets. The proposed framework offers a transferable and accurate solution for fine-scale soil salinity monitoring in data-scarce arid regions.