Central to Senani’s research is to understand the spatial and temporal variation of environmental variables in agricultural and natural resources context. It is believed that, outputs of this work will be contributed towards sustainable management of fragile natural recourses. To achieve this he is utilizing a combination of statistical and mechanistic models to predict variation of environmentally and agronomically important properties in space and time.
His current research work is focused on areas of pedometrics; digital soil mapping (from farm scale to country scale); development of sampling and monitoring schemes; proximal soil sensing (specifically infrared spectroscopy); chemometrics; use of Bayesian statistical approaches to quantify the uncertainty of carbon models; Development and validation of “space-time observation system for soil organic carbon”; and soil carbon sequestration. His on-going research projects include;
- Identification of spatial drivers and mapping of soil organic carbon stocks in tropical environments – in collaboration with Dr Tom Bishop (University of Sydney – Australia)
- Development of land use management plan for expansion of rubber to non-traditional growing areas in Sri Lanka – in collaboration with Dr. Wasana Wijesuriya (Rubber Research Institute of Sri Lanka)
- Mapping of climatic indexes for decision making related to expansion of rubber to non-traditional areas – in collaboration with Dr. Wasana Wijesuriya (Rubber Research Institute of Sri Lanka)
While working on these areas he also has ongoing interests on (i) developing low cost approaches to adopt precision agriculture techniques for developing countries; (ii) application of GIS/Remote sensing in natural resource management; (iii) land use/land cover modeling; (iv) ecological niche modeling; (v) community analysis in ecology specially related to major biochemical cycles.
Senani Karunaratne 