Sami Khanal

The overarching goal of my research program is to support the design of sustainable agricultural landscapes by promoting site-specific conservation practices that minimize crop yield gaps and enhance economic profitability while reducing negative environmental impacts. I aim to achieve this goal by improving our understanding of the interaction of climate with soil and crops under various management practices through the use of: (a) multimodal sensing applied to high spatial and temporal monitoring of crop phenology/health across scales, and (b) ecosystem modeling for simulating agronomic and environmental outcomes under alternative weather conditions and management practices. To simplify the process of identifying various crop risks, I focus on using: (c) machine learning and geospatial techniques to harness the power of big data.  I hope that the platforms and tools derived using high quality multimodal data will help farmers make better decisions about managing their crops, beyond reducing the amount of work they must do to monitor their fields. Furthermore, data-driven understanding of maximizing profit and managing risk could enable new products such as parametric insurance that insure not on outcomes, but on inputs that are correlated to outcomes.