Environmental and growth factors such as light intensity, vapor pressure deficit, and leaf area index are important variables that can change the transpiration rate of plants. The objective of this study was to compare the transpiration rates estimated by modified Penman-Monteith model and artificial neural network. The transpiration rate of paprika (Capsicum annuum L. cv. Fiesta) was obtained by using the change in substrate weight measured by load cells. Radiation, temperature, relative humidity, and substrate weight were collected every min for 2 months. Since the transpiration rate cannot be accurately estimated with linear equations, a modified Penman-Monteith equation using compensated radiation (Shin et al., 2014) was used. On the other hand, ANN was applied to estimating the transpiration rate. For this purpose, an ANN composed of an input layer using radiation, temperature, relative humidity, leaf area index, and time as input factors and five hidden layers was constructed. The number of perceptons in each hidden layer was 512, which showed the highest accuracy. As a result of validation, R 2 values of the modified model and ANN were 0.82 and 0.94, respectively. Therefore, it is concluded that the ANN can estimate the transpiration rate more accurately than the modified model and can be applied to the efficient irrigation strategy in soilless cultures.
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