Dr. Sahajpal is crop condition co-lead at the University of Maryland Harvest Hub, providing research support for Harvest activities. His areas of research include:

•    Monitoring crop yields from field to global scales using Earth observation data
•    Modeling the impacts of conservative agriculture practices on soil health and crop yield
•    Mapping land-use and land-cover change and modeling their impacts on the carbon-climate system
•    Vegetation and Carbon Redistribution under Climate Change

Biography
Dr. Ritvik Sahajpal is an Associate Research Professor at the Department of Geographical Sciences at University of Maryland, crop condition co-lead at NASA Harvest and a member of the data advisory council at Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR). His research expertise is broadly related to using Earth observation data to monitor crop yields from field to global scales, modeling the impacts of conservative agriculture practices on soil health and crop yield, and mapping land-use and land-cover change and modeling their impacts on the carbon-climate system. Dr. Sahajpal uses both machine learning and data driven agro-ecosystem modeling techniques in his work. His research has been funded by NASA, FFAR, USAID and published in journals like Nature, Environmental Research Letters, Geoscientific Model Development and Science of the Total Environment. Previously, he was a post-doc at the Forest and Wildlife Ecology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and finished his PhD in Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland in 2014.