Sandip Rijal

🏠 About | 💻 Projects | 📚 Publications | 📧 Contact

🏠 About Me

Hello, I am Sandip Rijal from Nepal, a PhD student in the Department of Geoscience at Florida Atlantic University (joined Spring 2023). I specialise in Remote Sensing and Spatial Data Science with a strong focus on Machine Learning applications in environmental and water resource management.

Education

Ph.D. Geoscience Florida Atlantic University, USA (Current)

M.S.C in Environment Management Forest Research Institute, Dehradun, India, 2019

B.S.C in Forestry Tribhuvan University, Institute of Forestry, Hetauda, Nepal, 2016

Technical Expertise

Remote Sensing & GIS: ArcGIS, ERDAS Imagine, ENVI, E-Cognition, Google Earth Engine, WebGIS

Programming & Analysis: Time Series, SAR Data Analysis, LIDAR (Fusion), PostgreSQL/PostGIS

Modeling & Machine Learning: Deep Learning (PyTorch, TorchGeo, LSTM, GRU), Machine learning (RF, SVM, ANN, kNN, Gradient Boosting)

Field Data Collection: Field Map, Survey123

Work Experience Highlights

Graduate Research Assistant: Lead RA for a Watershed Project (Flood Water Management, Automated Mapping in Polk County, FL) and a Wetland Classification Project (WorldView Imagery and Machine Learning).
Graduate Teaching Assistant: Application in GIS course (Spring 2024).

Grants & Scholarships

2024: Graduate Excellence Scholarship at FAU
2017: SAARC Scholarship for Master’s course

💻 Featured Projects

1. Downscaling Sentinel-3 Temperature Data

Temperature Downscaling Animation

Used Sentinel-3 thermal data and Sentinel-2 multispectral imagery to generate high-resolution temperature data. The time-series data for the same location were combined into a NetCDF file for easier handling and storage.

2. Dynamic Hindu-Kush Himalaya

Hindu-Kush Himalaya Timelapse

Google Earth Engine (GEE) to generate a timelapse animation for the Hindu-Kush Himalayas region. This project used imagery from 2019 to 2024 to visually demonstrate the changing snow and vegetation cover on a seasonal basis.

📚 Publications

Thapa Chhetri, M., and Rijal, S., 2023. Satellite-based Analysis of Lake Okeechobee’s Surface Water: Exploring Machine Learning Classification for Change Detection Environ. Sci. Proc. 2024, 29(1), 7; https://doi.org/10.3390/ECRS2023-15835
Puri, NK., Verma, AK., Chhetri R., Chand, HB., Rijal, S., 2022. Species Distribution Modelling of Two Sympatric Hornbills: The Great Hornbill and Rufous-Necked Hornbill in Bhutan, International Journal of Ecology, vol. 2022, Article ID 1475501, 9 pages, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/1475501
Rijal, S., Subedi, M., Chhetri, R., Joshi, R., 2021. Good Governance Assessment in Community Forest of Nepal, Journal of Forest and Environmental Science. https://doi.org/10.7747/JFES.2021.37.2.1
Rijal, S., Rauniyar, A., Thapa, S., Paudel, U., and Gautam, D., 2020. Ecosystem Services of Wetlands and Threats in context of Nepal, International Journal on Forest, Soil and Erosion. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.10767.41127
Joshi, R., Singh, H., Chhetri, R., Paudel, S., and Rijal, S., 2020. Carbon Sequestration Potential of Community Forest: A Comparative Analysis of Soil Organic Carbon Stock in Community Forest of Far-Western Nepal, Eurasian Journal of Soil Science. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18393/ejss.xxxxxxx