What is this collection about?

Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming agriculture, enabling more precise, resilient, and sustainable food production systems. From crop monitoring and yield prediction to autonomous machinery and climate adaptation, AI-powered approaches are increasingly integrated across the agricultural value chain. As global agriculture faces mounting pressures from climate change, resource scarcity, and rising food demand, AI-driven technologies offer powerful tools to improve how agricultural systems are understood, monitored, and managed. Applications of these technologies are helping farmers, researchers, and policymakers make more timely and evidence-based decisions.

Advances in edge and distributed computing, lightweight machine learning, and sensor-rich Internet of Things (IoT) systems offer new opportunities to process and act on data directly where it is generated: on farms, in greenhouses, and across supply networks. These approaches can reduce latency, improve privacy, and enable real-time decision-making that is critical for agricultural applications. Equally important are considerations of reliability, interpretability, and equitable deployment, ensuring that technological innovation translates into tangible benefits for diverse agricultural contexts.

With this Collection, editors at Communications AI & Computing, Nature Communications and Communications Sustainability invite high-quality submissions that advance the computational foundations and applications of AI in smart agriculture. We particularly welcome contributions that demonstrate rigorous methodology, practical relevance, and clear advances over the state of the art.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Novel machine learning models and architectures for agricultural data
• Resource-efficient and edge-deployable AI systems in agricultural settings
• Novel climate solutions and adaptive management enabled by AI in agriculture systems
• AI-Enhanced Understanding of Agricultural Processes and Decision-Making
• Autonomous systems for precision agriculture
• Climate-aware modelling, forecasting, and decision-support tools
• Data quality, benchmarking, and reproducibility in agricultural AI
• Socio-technical, ethical, and sustainability considerations in AI-enabled agriculture

The Collection primarily welcomes original Research and Software papers. Communications AI & Computing and Communications Sustainability will also consider Reviews and Perspectives.

Why is this collection important?

This Collection supports and amplifies research directly related to the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goal 1, 2, 12 and 15 – No Poverty, Zero Hunger, Responsible Consumption and Production, and Life on Land.

Why submit to a collection?

Collections like this one help promote high-quality science. They are led by In-House Editors who are experts in their fields and supported by a dedicated team of Commissioning Editors and Managing Editors at Springer Nature. Collection manuscripts typically see higher citations, downloads, and Altmetric scores, and provide a one-stop-shop on a cutting-edge topic of interest.

Who is involved?

This is a cross-journal Collection involving Communications AI & Computing, Communications Sustainability, and Nature Communications. Authors are welcome to submit to any of the participating journals. All manuscripts published in the collection are hosted on a dedicated nature portfolio portal, giving articles high visibility beyond the journal they are published in.

How can I submit my paper?

Visit the Collection page to find out more about this collection and submit your article.