The 'SDA' team, composed of master's degree students and undergraduates from the Department of Smart Farm and supervised by Professor Kim Tae-gon, won the top prize—the Minister's Award from the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs—at the 1st KSAE AX-Water Challenge 2025 organized by the Korean Society of Agricultural Engineers.

This competition aimed to develop an artificial intelligence (AI) solution to support the efficient operation of agricultural reservoirs in response to extreme weather events caused by climate change.

The Jeonbuk National University (JBNU) team (Jeong Jae-young, Seok Seung-won, Jang Eun-su) developed a model to predict reservoir water levels using 10-minute interval water level and meteorological data from 19 agricultural reservoirs. They cleaned missing values and outliers in the field data and built deep learning models based on LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) and GRU (Gated Recurrent Unit) specialized for time-series forecasting.

They implemented a web-based visualization system to compare and analyze each model's prediction results, enabling field personnel to make more accurate data-driven decisions.

The developed AI models achieved predictive accuracy of over 95% for most reservoirs. In reservoirs showing stable water-level changes, they achieved near-perfect predictive performance. These results are expected to serve as foundational technology for future early warning systems for floods and droughts and for improving water resource management efficiency.

Through this project, JBNU's 'SDA' team gained experience directly handling the complexity and incompleteness of field data and strengthened practice-oriented problem-solving capabilities. The accomplishment is also regarded as meaningful, confirming that AI technology can make a practical contribution to climate change response and the sustainable development of agriculture beyond mere technical implementation.

Professor Kim Tae-gon, Chair of the Department of Smart Farm, said, "Our department recruits outstanding talent and, through integrated education in core technologies of digital and smart agriculture and in biological and environmental fields, trains future-oriented agricultural professionals," adding, "This award is regarded as nationwide validation of those educational outcomes."