Maninder Singh Dhillon is PhD student at the Department of Remote Sensing at the University of Wuerzburg. He is observing the crop statistics such as crop biomass and crop yield using crop growth models (CGMs) for the state of Bavaria, Germany. In this context, he will be designing different CGMs in collaboration with synthetic remote sensing time series, and climate model output for monitoring of biomass and prediction of crop yields for wheat, maize, and oilseed rape. His Ph.D. project is part of the work package “Mapping of land use and ecosystem services using remote sensing” (Bayklif) within the research project “Effects of climate change on biodiversity and ecosystem services in semi-natural, agricultural and urban landscapes and strategies for management of climate change“ (Landklif,TP7).
Maninder studied at the department’s EAGLE Master program, specializing in Earth Observation and Geoanalysis in 2016 batch. He finished his studies with his Master Thesis on agricultural crop statistics, titled “Comparing the performance of crop growth models using synthetic remote sensing data at DEMMIN, Germany”. During his Master studies, he worked as a student research assistant at the department and published two international research papers on delineation of critical regions and estimation of increasing carbon emissions due to the enormous amount of groundwater usage in India. To obtain more experience on crop-related statistics, he joined the department of National Ground Segment in Neustrelitz of German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD) at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) for his internship titles “Comparing the performance of different evapotranspiration models using the weather station data of Toitz station, Germany”.
During his masters, Maninder developed lue package (light use efficiency) in R to estimate crop biomass by analyzing the impact of various climate parameters. In addition, he is also developing other crop yield-related packages for WOFOST, CopSyst, DSSAT Ceres wheat, and Aqua Crop. Professionally, Maninder wants to become a professor in Africa and to help children by providing them the education. Talking about hobbies, Maninder is interested in gardening and to enroll in different social services.
