Prediction Method of Canopy Temperature for Potted Winter Jujube in Controlled Environments Based on a Fusion Model of LSTM–RF

The canopy temperature of winter jujube serves as a direct indicator of plant water status and transpiration efficiency, making its accurate prediction a critical prerequisite for effective water management and optimized growth conditions in greenhouse environments. This study developed a data-driven model to forecast canopy temperature. The model serially integrates a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network and a Random Forest (RF) algorithm, leveraging their complementary strengths in capturing temporal dependencies and robust nonlinear fitting. A three-stage framework comprising temporal feature extraction, multi-source feature fusion, and direct prediction was implemented to enable reliable nowcasting. Data acquisition and preprocessing were tailored to the greenhouse environment, involving multi-sensor data and thermal imagery processed with Robust Principal Component Analysis (RPCA) for dimensionality reduction. Key environmental variables were selected through Spearman correlation analysis. Experimental results demonstrated that the proposed LSTM–RF model achieved superior performance, with a determination coefficient (R2) of 0.974, mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.844 °C, and root mean square error (RMSE) of 1.155 °C, outperforming benchmark models including standalone LSTM, RF, Transformer, and TimesNet. SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations)-based interpretability analysis further quantified the influence of key factors, including the “thermodynamic state of air” driver group and latent temporal features, offering actionable insights for irrigation management. The model establishes a reliable, interpretable foundation for real-time water stress monitoring and precision irrigation control in protected winter jujube production systems.