Sonal Bakiwala

I am involved in developing remote sensing based applications for the stakeholders especially regional Corteva business. I have been leading the remote sensing efforts for regional business India for Corteva since March, 2020

Using satellite data and creating solutions like pest predictions and forecast, crop classification/mapping, crop acreage estimations, crop yield predictions, phenology mapping, etc

Roles and Responsibilities :

• Team lead for development of Fall Armyworm forecasting solutions for the commercial team to alert the farmers in timely fashion. This project aimed at using multi-sensor data from satellite, weather, IoT devices and ground truth incidences and building machine learning model with high accuracy(CatBoost model was used) to predict risk probability for high corn growing areas.
• Involved in classification of different rice cultivation practices using SAR dataset. The machine learning model built using SVM for rice mapping and classifying different rice practices for better management of water and herbicides.
• Currently working on developing forecasting model for potato late blight so that farmers can use data driven informed decisions for applying chemical solutions in their fields and target more sustainable agriculture. In this project weather based rules methodology is being applied.
• Working on corn yield estimation, this is also in efforts using SAR dataset. The everyday data is being imputed using several different methodologies like Loess, moving average, PCA etc to provide a better picture of field data and fill gaps for every image acquisition from sentinel-1
• Visualizations/Dashboards in Power BI for stakeholders to consume.