An agricultural drought early warning threshold model with considering copula combined with diminishing marginal benefit theory: A case study in the Yellow River basin

Tanrui Qian, Xiaoling Su, Haijiang Wu, Vijay P. Singh and Te Zhang

Agricultural Water Management, 2025, vol. 316, issue C

Abstract: Agricultural drought-induced yield reductions threaten socioeconomic stability and food security. Reliable early warning systems are essential for mitigating these threats. However, agricultural drought early warning based on meteorological conditions remains poorly explored, and prevalent conditional probabilities for determining drought propagation thresholds are largely subjective. In this study, an agricultural drought early warning threshold (ADEWarT) model was developed, combining Copula and diminishing marginal benefit theory, leveraging inherent regional drought propagation characteristics to objectively determine the thresholds. The ADEWarT model was applied and evaluated in the rain-fed agricultural areas of the Yellow River basin (raYRB) during the crop-growing seasons. Results showed that in most raYRB during the crop-growing seasons, early warning indicators for agricultural drought were the preceding meteorological drought conditions, while in the central-western raYRB during spring, they were the preceding compound drought and hot events. The performance metric, Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC), demonstrated that the ADEWarT model performed well (MCC > 0.4) across the raYRB. Compared with subjectively determined propagation thresholds, the proposed model exhibited superior performance during summer and autumn. The eXtreme Gradient Boosting combined with SHapley Additive exPlanations (XGBoost-SHAP) method revealed that the impacts of vegetation on early warning thresholds were modulated by hydrothermal conditions. Areas with lower absolute early warning thresholds were generally located on steep slopes, shady aspects, and at low elevations across the raYRB, indicating higher agricultural drought risk. This study provides technical guidance for agricultural drought risk management in the raYRB and offers a transferable framework applicable to other regions.

Keywords: Diminishing marginal benefit theory; Early warning; Agricultural drought; Copula; XGBoost; SHAP (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378377425002963
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:agiwat:v:316:y:2025:i:c:s0378377425002963

DOI: 10.1016/j.agwat.2025.109582

Access Statistics for this article

Agricultural Water Management is currently edited by B.E. Clothier, W. Dierickx, J. Oster and D. Wichelns

More articles in Agricultural Water Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().