Broadly trained as a Landscape Ecologist, Dr. Singh has backgrounds in Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, Forestry, Urban and Regional Planning, and Architecture. His research focuses on the application of geospatial tools for addressing basic and applied questions in landscape-scale conservation planning in South Texas in particular, and internationally, in South Asia and West Africa. He leads the CKWRI Spatial Analytics Laboratory and Technology hub (C-SALT) which serves the geospatial needs of CKWRI’s faculty, students, and stakeholders. C-SALT aims at developing novel remote sensing instrumentation and analytical techniques to better understand and manage the functional ecology of South Texas landscapes. Activities at C-SALT focus on fusing multi-modal remote sensing data streams (hyperspectral, LiDAR, high-resolution UAV, and regional-scale satellite imaging) to understand the structure, composition, and functioning landscapes in the context of wildlife habitat provisioning and resilience to ecological, anthropogenic, and climatological disturbances.
Dr. Singh was raised in Northwestern India in a landscape much like South Texas. While in India, he obtained a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from the Madhav Institute of Technology and Science, Gwalior, and a postgraduate diploma in Planning from the Center for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT), Ahmedabad. While employed at the CEPT consultancy cell as a postgraduate researcher, he was granted a scholarship to study applied Geoinformatics at the Indian Institute of Remote Sensing, Dehradun. Rediscovering his love for the outdoors in the Himalayas, he relocated to the Ashoka Trust for Ecology and Environment, Bangalore as a GIS/remote sensing scientist. Soon after, he landed a graduate scholarship at the University of Florida as a MS Wildlife Ecology and Conservation student studying Northern bobwhite habitat ecology in South Florida. Finally, he obtained his PhD in forestry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he utilized airborne hyperspectral imagery to investigate the influence of forest canopy biochemistry on landscape-scale nutrient cycling in the Upper Midwestern US. He was employed at the University of Florida Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering as an Assistant Professor of remote sensing for seven years before moving to CKWRI-TAMUK.
