SCIENTIFIC STUDY ON SUSTAINABLE CATTLE RANCHING

Support for former IPCC Scholarship recipient – Dr Pedro Fernandez.

Since 2013, the Foundation has partnered with the IPCC Scholarship programme to support PhD students from developing countries in their scientific research to understand the risks of climate change and its impact on their local environments and communities.

The Foundation is continuing its commitment by enabling and funding further applied research by a number of those former recipients of the IPCC scholarship programme in their current investigations. Argentine researcher Dr Pedro Fernandez was a beneficiary of the 2019-21 IPCC scholarship awards funded by the Foundation.

In 2022, the Cuomo Foundation agreed to support Dr Fernandez in his new research project to be undertaken at the Humboldt University of Berlin. A funding agreement was signed on March 5th,2022 with the Humboldt University and with the researcher’s home institute, the National Institute of Agricultural Technology in Argentina.

Excerpt of the 2022 progress report on Dr Fernandez project, by his supervisor Professor Tobias Kuemmerle of the Humboldt University of Berlin:

“During the last four months, the project “Sustainable cattle ranching in South America’s tropical dry forests” progressed as planned by Dr Fernandez.

On the one hand, Dr Fernandez leads a systematic review of the cattle ranching in the South American dry diagonal, and a manuscript reviewing knowledge gaps and opportunities to rot them has been started to be written.

On the other hand, mapping efforts to characterize livestock intensification have begun, and training data have been prepared. We started to identify machine learning and deep learning methods to map feedlots and silage bags for the whole Chaco region, and the models will be calibrated by Fernandez and another PhD student together with the lab team. Finally, new networks were built to address the problem in collaborative research together with Alto University (Finland), Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) and Madison State University (USA). Researchers from these institutions will help carry out the research questions, especially in the Cerrado and Caatinga biomes. In this sense, also local organizations were contacted, particularly in Bolivia and Paraguay, and will help to the process with field training and validation, data.

In the next three months, Dr Fernandez will complete the mapping efforts for the Dry Chaco and Chiquitania and submit to a peer-reviewed journal the review manuscript. In addition, two research manuscripts will be advanced with key research questions of the problem addressed.”

Amount awarded in 2022

€ 25,000

Total budget allocated

€ 50,000