Vineet Kumar works as a Lecturer/Researcher in Agricultural Water Management and Remote Sensing in the Land and Water Management Department at IHE Delft. His research interests include satellite remote sensing data analytics, algorithm development and geo-spatial analysis. He has used satellite derived information in land use land cover changes, agriculture monitoring (crop phenology, bio-physical characteristics, soil moisture) and disaster responses. His area of specialization is Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) remote sensing.
Before joining IHE Delft, he worked as an Assistant Professor at Jamsetji Tata School of Disaster Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai, India. Prior to that, he worked as a Geospatial Data Expert at the Geospatial Unit, Land and Water Division, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO-UN), Rome, Italy. During this period, he supported the ongoing geospatial activities in Sudan, Yemen, and greening the humanitarian response project in four African countries. He also served as a consultant at PixxelSpace India for a brief period of 3 months (April-June) 2023. During his post-doctoral tenure (2019-2022) at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, he led Agricultural SandboxNL project of generating crop parcel-level geospatial database using Sentinel SAR over the Netherlands. The database has been used for monitoring 2018 Netherland’s drought, marking field-level farming activities and simulating the radar backscatter in the crop growth model.
He holds a master’s degree in Remote sensing and GIS from the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, ISRO, Dehradun, India and a Ph.D. in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remote sensing from IIT Bombay, Mumbai, India. His doctoral research was focused on using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite datasets for state-of-the-art algorithm development for LULC mapping, spatio-temporal analysis, crop phenology and bio-geophysical parameter monitoring and retrieval. He has contributed to the development of SAR-based vegetation indices.
He has planned and participated many in-situ geospatial and bio-physical data collection field campaigns synchronously with satellite imagery acquisitions in India and abroad. He was a part of Soil Moisture Active Passive Validation Experiment (SMAPVEX16-MB) Manitoba, Canada field campaign jointly conducted by Agriculture Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), NASA, USDA, and various Canadian universities in June and July 2016.
He has served as a reviewer to high-impact remote sensing Journals such as Remote Sensing of Environment, International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, IEEE TGRS, IEEE-JSTARS, IEEE-GRSL, GIScience and Remote Sensing, etc. Vineet Kumar received the Shastri Research Student Fellowship in 2016 to work as a visiting researcher at Carleton University and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC), Canada.
Publications
A complete list of publications can be found in Google Scholar.