Domain-Informed Graph Neural Networks for Climate Factor Forecasting to Support Sustainable Crop Management

Abstract

Forecasting climate factors is critical for anticipating agro-climatic risks and enabling sustainable crop management. However, accurate prediction remains challenging due to complex spatiotemporal variability, heterogeneous seasonal patterns, and intricate interdependencies among climate variables. Inspired by agronomic knowledge, We propose DoIGNN, a Domain-Informed Graph Neural Network that injects a domain-structured graph constraint built from Agro-Climatic Homogeneous Zones (ACHZs). Specifically, we partition stations into agro-climatic zones using long-term climatic statistics and location attributes, and construct a hierarchical ACHZ-guided adjacency. To better capture shared climate dynamics, we introduce a spatiotemporal decomposition module with temporal regularization that factorizes the climate tensor into low-rank global temporal bases and station loadings, yielding a compact station-level global component as auxiliary information for target forecasting. Finally, DoIGNN performs forecasting on both the ACHZ-guided and static-dynamic graphs to learn cross-region dependencies. Experiments on real-world climate datasets demonstrate that DoIGNN consistently improves forecasting accuracy over strong baselines while yielding more interpretable spatial dependency patterns that support climate-informed crop management decisions. Cooperating with Ningbo Natural Resources and Planning Big Data Center, the proposed model has been trained and deployed for local data analysis.