This spring Shangharsha Thapa, a master student at Lund University, has validated SITES Spectral data for his thesis under the supervision of Dr. Virginia Garcia and Prof. Lars Eklundh. Shangharsha is originally from Nepal where he has studied Geomatics Engineering at Kathmandu University. He has spent the last two years in Lund being part of the master programme in Geomatics. Shangharsha has used near-surface remote sensing data from phenocameras, fixed sensors and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flights, which were sampled within the Spectral monitoring of Asa Research Station. He has evaluated the seasonal dynamics of tree species on a local scale and he could prove that phenocameras and multispectral sensors correlated well in regard to the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI). Overall, Shangharsha has been satisfied with the structure of the thematic programme and its data organization.
‒ “The best part of the research work was the reliability of the datasets from SITES”, says Shangharsha. “Also the well-managed metadata and hardware facilities for data processing were good.”
Shangharsha explains that he wants to contribute to the academic and research sector in Nepal in the field of geomatics and wants to take his studies further as a PhD student and Postdoc.
‒ “I want to thank SITES staff, especially Virginia Garcia Millan for supervising and guiding me throughout the thesis. And lastly, thanks to SITES Spectral for providing me an opportunity to work with a wide range of sensor datasets.”
All the best of luck for the future from the SITES community!