Research Projects

Surface Soil Moisture Mapping for Supporting Agro-Advisories in Rainfed Agriculture

Soil moisture is highly relevant for agriculture, plant health, temperature variability, and land-atmosphere feedbacks. Emerging opportunities in satellite remote sensing at high Spatio-temporal resolution offer great potential for soil moisture retrieval at the field level. In this project, we used the synergistic use of microwave (Sentinel-1), optical (Sentinel-2, Landsat 8) and thermal infrared (Landsat 8) remote sensing and an ensemble-of-all approaches for surface soil moisture (SSM) monitoring over a semi-arid irrigated agricultural farm.

I was evolved in the field sampling of ground-truthed measurements of soil moisture, crop type, cropping system, crop growth stages and vegetation descriptors such as normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and leaf area index (LAI), preprocessing of satellite data (Sentinel-1, Landsat 8), calibration/inversion of WCM model and generation of crop type map using Sentinel-1,2 data.

The project is a part of National Fellow project funded by Indian Council of Agricultural Research.

Vulnerability assessment of Mountain Ecosystems due to climate change: Ecosystem structure and functioning

Due to their young and fragile nature coupled with sharp gradients, the Himalayan Mountains are particularly vulnerable to climate change. With growing population pressure, natural and socio-economic systems in these mountain regions are at risk. The rapid change of the ecosystem, driven by both natural and anthropogenic determinants poses unprecedented threat not only to the livelihood of the local people, wildlife and culture, but also to the billions living in the downstream and ultimately to the global environment. This project aimed at assessing the susceptibility of the distribution/ ranges of western Himalayan species under climate and land use land cover changes.

As a PhD scholar I worked under the same research theme and contributed in modelling species distributions and assemblages across western Himalaya, Land Use Land Cover (LULC) mapping and modelling, forest fragmentation analysis using landscape indices and Statistical analysis of phytosociological data.

The project was funded by Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), Dept. of Space, India

Forest-PLUS 2.0

Forest-PLUS is a five-year programme initiated in December 2018 that focuses on developing tools and techniques to bolster ecosystem management and harnessing ecosystem services in forest landscape management. It comprises pilot project in three landscapes — Gaya in Bihar, Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala and Medak in Telangana. The choice of these sites was driven by the contrast in their landscapes – Bihar is a forest deficit area, Telangana is a relatively drier area where there is ample scope for community livelihood enhancement and Kerala is rich in biodiversity. I worked briefly for the project where I was involved in identifying payment for ecosystem services (PES) mechanisms at above mentioned sites.

The project was funded by US Agency for International Development (USAID).

Development of payment for ecosystem services (PES) mechanisms, recommendations and guidelines for implementation of PES & forest ecosystem services (FES) in Himachal Pradesh

PES schemes involve payments to the managers of land or other natural resources in exchange for the provision of specified ecosystem services (or actions anticipated to deliver these services) over-and-above what would otherwise be provided in the absence of payment. Payments are made by the beneficiaries of the services in question, for example, individuals, communities, businesses or governments acting on behalf of various parties on volunteer basis. This project aimed at developing guidelines for implementation of PES at three sites in Himachal Pradesh, India. As a manager in the forestry team, I was responsible for carrying out baseline field surveys, stakeholder consultations, quantification of ecosystem services and overall management of the project.

The project was funded by The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH (GIZ)