ITC presented her the award for her outstanding scientific publication on the remote sensing of lodged crops. Earlier this year, she defended her PhD cum laude. The award Sugandh receives is accompanied by a cheque of €1500. “I am very honoured to receive this award. I thank the ITC faculty and my supervisors Andy, Roshanak and Mirco for contributing to this success. Honestly, this year has been the best for me in every sense: successfully finishing my PhD within 4 years with a Cum Laude, getting a job and the PhD publication award is a cherry on top.”
*Update December 2021: Sugandh Chauhan also won the Overijssel PhD Award for this research.
The jury – consisting of three professors from ITC, a PhD candidate selected by pITCom and an external member – praised the practical and scientific relevance of her work. “The results of her work are very relevant. It aligns with the Sustainable Development Goals laid out by the United Nations.” She has been awarded the award for her publication called “Understanding wheat lodging using multi-temporal Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data“.
Crop Lodging
Sometimes the stems of cereal crops bend, this is called crop lodging. In wheat, this can lead to yield losses of up to 75%. Sugandh developed an innovative, remote sensing-based approach to map lodging severity, detect the time of its incidence and predict lodging susceptibility in wheat. This can help farmers take measures to prevent the lodging from happening, mitigate the lodging impacts, decrease production costs and increase crop yield and grain quality. “I’m excited the jury saw the importance of my research. My research is a small step to contributing to food security and reduce the environmental impact of crop losses.”, says Sugandh.
About Sugandh
Sugandh Chauhan was a PhD student in the research group Natural Resources (NRS). Sugandh defended her PhD thesis, titled Remote Sensing Of Crop Lodging: A Multi-Sensor Approach, cum laude on 11 November and has created an interactive story map to visualize her research.
About the Award
The ITC PhD Publication award is an annual prize presented to a PhD student being the first author of an outstanding scientific publication. The prize consists out of an award certificate and €1500. A jury evaluates the nominated publications based on the criteria of presentation, innovation, scientific rigour, practical/scientific relevance and “interesting to read”. After which the Dean presents the award to the winning PhD student in December.
