Postdoc (Researcher) Remote sensing for vegetable farming in Indonesia

You initiate, carry out and participate in research and project activities on image analysis that are relevant for the project “Information services for sustainable vegetable farm management (SMARTSeeds; http://g4aw.spaceoffice.nl/en/Projects/G4AW-Project-leaflets/)”, which is funded by the Geodata for Agriculture and Water (G4AW) Facility and will start on October 1, 2016.

ITC is one of the partners in this project, which is led by ICCO Indonesia. The overall objective of the project is to “increase the income of vegetable and chili farmers by increasing farm productivity, improving efficiency of use of inputs (water, fertilizers) and improving access to finance through provision of agribusiness information ranging from production to harvesting”. As part of this project, an information service is developed, based on geodata (including remote sensing) and field data to supply farmers with advice on crop plans, and inputs.

Within this project, ITC, in collaboration with the Agricultural University of Bogor (IPB) and the Geo-spatial Informational Agency (BIG), will develop specific routines for integrated classification of series of Sentinel-1 and -2 and Landsat-8 images with respect to type of vegetable crops (focussing on cucumber, tomato and chillies) and for following crop growth and development throughout the cropping season. Classification will use methods such as Random Forest, allowing for the combined use of many parameters, both spectral and derived (e.g. texture or indices) and images of different sources. A combination of indices related to biomass will be used to follow crop development over time. Field data for training and validation will come via our partners in the project, from UAV flights, field survey and, later on in the project, from information uploaded by the farmers. ITC also supports the consortium with techniques for spatial data integration, especially regarding soil data. As part of ITC’s contribution to the project, your work will focus on image processing and the development of largely automated workflows to extract information on crop area and crop development.

You may supervise MSc and PhD students and participate in research activities with ITC’s partner institutes abroad. You participate in national and international professional societies.