Ron van Bree

I’m a PhD Candidate at the Artificial Intelligence group at Wageningen University & Research under the supervision of Ioannis Athanasiadis and Diego Marcos. My research interests lie at the intersection of machine learning and its application in agriculture.

news

Jun 18, 2026	🎉 Our paper CY-Bench: a comprehensive benchmark dataset for sub-national crop yield forecasting has been published in Earth System Science Data (ESSD)!
Dec 09, 2025	🎉 Our paper on benchmarking models predicting fruit tree phenology has been accepted to the AAAI 2026 AgriAI Workshop!
Jul 17, 2025	Our perspective paper on Foundation Models for agriculture has been accepted to the SEA workshop at ICCV 2025!
Dec 09, 2024	Our work highlighting the need for transdisciplinary coordination in agricultural modeling has been accepted at One Earth!
Dec 09, 2024	Excited to share that our paper on integrating machine learning into biophysical tree phenology models has been accepted at AAAI 2025!

selected publications

AAAI
Hybrid phenology modeling for predicting temperature effects on tree dormancy

Ron Van Bree, Diego Marcos , and Ioannis N Athanasiadis

In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence , 2025

Abs Bib Code

We present a hybrid approach combining deep learning with phenological modeling to predict temperature effects on tree dormancy. Our method integrates domain knowledge from traditional phenology models with the flexibility of neural networks, demonstrating improved accuracy in predicting bud break timing under varying temperature conditions.
@inproceedings{van2025hybrid, title = {Hybrid phenology modeling for predicting temperature effects on tree dormancy}, author = {Van Bree, Ron and Marcos, Diego and Athanasiadis, Ioannis N}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence}, volume = {39}, number = {27}, pages = {28458--28466}, year = {2025}, }

ONE

Transdisciplinary coordination is essential for advancing agricultural modeling with machine learning

Lily-belle Sweet , Ioannis N Athanasiadis , Ron Van Bree, Andres Castellano , and 4 more authors

One Earth, 2025

Abs Bib

@article{sweet2025transdisciplinary,
  title = {Transdisciplinary coordination is essential for advancing agricultural modeling with machine learning},
  author = {Sweet, Lily-belle and Athanasiadis, Ioannis N and Van Bree, Ron and Castellano, Andres and Martre, Pierre and Paudel, Dilli and Ruane, Alex C and Zscheischler, Jakob},
  journal = {One Earth},
  volume = {8},
  number = {4},
  year = {2025},
  publisher = {Elsevier},
}

CVPR
Neural prototype trees for interpretable fine-grained image recognition

Meike Nauta , Ron Van Bree, and Christin Seifert

In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition , 2021

Abs Bib PDF Code

We propose Neural Prototype Trees (ProtoTrees), a novel interpretable deep learning architecture for fine-grained image recognition. Our model combines prototype learning with decision trees, enabling both accurate and interpretable predictions.
@inproceedings{nauta2021neural, title = {Neural prototype trees for interpretable fine-grained image recognition}, author = {Nauta, Meike and Van Bree, Ron and Seifert, Christin}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition}, pages = {14933--14943}, year = {2021}, }