Research officer I - Remote Sensing & GIS at International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI)

International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) seeks to recruit a Research officer I - Remote Sensing & GIS to apply remote sensing and GIS technology to product design part of Index Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI). He/she will work with the team of economist and socio-economist to integrate geospatial skills for upgradation of IBLI product using research, stakeholder and community engagements.

Key Responsibilities

• Research for Development
  • Contribute to the development, testing and validation of innovative remote sensing-based methods (using multispectral remote sensing sensors) to identify pastoral and agropastoral systems.
  • Evaluate, identify and characterize rangelands and its phenology.
  • Evaluate the research findings, and contribute to the writing of reports, research papers and other communication material.
  • Plan multiple experiments/surveys and research studies utilizing the Geographic Information System (GIS).
  • Manage the data collection process for primary and secondary datasets from the field soil, water, weather and crops and grassland using appropriate devices.
  • Manage the large data sets.
• Partnerships and Stakeholder engagement
  • Manage existing partnerships and identify and innovative partnerships towards sharing and implementation of research findings.
  • Contribute to the engagement with institutional stakeholders, including to inform about climate risk financing.
• Capacity Development and Knowledge Management
  • plan, survey and coordinate the materials and resources. required to meet the research objectives of the group.
  • Collect, store and curate data generated from the analytics.
  • Review existing literature for scientific gaps understanding.
  • Prepare project reports and papers for presentation.

Requirements

• Master’s Degree in Geospatial Science/ Geography/ Environmental Science/Agriculture/ Ecology or other related discipline with at least 4 years’ relevant work experience of application of remote sensing and GIS on agriculture/ natural resources.
• Land cover mapping, vegetation phenology, cropping system mapping, drone operations, and database management, analytics using physical (soil, water and climate) and pastoralists databases.
• Proven knowledge of field data collection for geospatial analysis.   
• Has good working knowledge of remote sensing and GIS software, Database and  software such as Arc GIS, ENVI and e-Cognition.
• Substantial experience in scripting such as R/ Python and Google Earth Engine.
• Experience of any of statistical analysis and logical development of models.
• Experience of working with multi spectral satellites.
• Strong written and oral communication skills in English with the ability to communicate with diverse audiences.
• Proven ability to work in multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural teams with minimal supervision, and experience working across disciplines and different cultural backgrounds.
• Willingness to travel frequently to rural and remote areas of project sites in different countries.
• Record of publications and experience with resource mobilization and contributing to project proposals would be an asset.
• Communication skills for peer reviewed publications
• Programmming skills using R/ Python