Deepak Ray
Global agriculture; fertilizers; irrigation; U.S. land ownership
Background & Expertise
Deepak Ray (he/him) is a research professor in global landscapes. He develops and conducts research on land, mostly at global scales, and at high spatial resolutions. The questions that he seeks to answer are exploring – through the land lens – ways towards a future in which people and the planet prosper together. Most of his past and current work has been in the discipline of global agriculture, geared to help NGOs, industries, international organizations and governments to make more informed policies and decisions. Ray and his team are now working on land ownership in the United States, developing global irrigation maps, N-P-K fertilizer by crops timeseries, and individual crop harvested areas and yields. His academic goals are to research and publish accurate high-resolution findings related to land at scales that enable policy and decision making. He is among the top 1% of highly cited global researchers.
Mapping Fruit Trees, Learning From Community Forestry
Understanding the agricultural output of land can lead to higher protection for that land. Mining companies, for example, are lobbying the Indian government for access to tribal land, which can be economically tempting. But what if researchers could show that these lands already offer a significant economic value?