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

Key Responsibilities

• The position holder is expected to apply remote sensing and GIS technology to rangeland ecology and livestock systems. He/she will work with the team of multi-disciplinary scientist to integrate geospatial skills into livestock systems using research, stakeholder, and community engagements.
• 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 and design 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.
  • Contribute to the project’s activities on related aspects/ themes under the guidance of the supervisor.
• Partnerships and Stakeholder engagement
  • Support and contribute towards strengthening existing partnerships and identifying new and innovative partnerships towards sharing and implementation of research findings at the policy level and with different stakeholders
  • Contribute to the engagement with institutional stakeholders, including high level government representatives, to inform about climate risk financing.
• Capacity Development and Knowledge Management
  • In conjunction with the scientist, 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 course of actions and support in the development of proposals, milestones and implementation of research.
  • Prepare and assure quality of project reports and papers for presentation.
  • Ensure timely delivery of geospatial products for projects as and when assigned.
  • Support fund generation activities by contributing to proposal writing and creating new opportunities.

Requirements

• Master’s Degree in Geospatial Science/ Environmental Science/Agriculture/ Ecology or other related discipline with at least 3 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