Geospatial Data in Agriculture Risk Management | Biographies of Contributors

Dr. Nathan Torbick

Research Scientist, Applied Geosolutions

Dr. Nathan Torbick’s research interests stretch across several disciplines and can be grouped into broad categories. The first broad effort is related climate-land interactions under the framework of global change and human-environment themes. Much of Nathan’s work under this theme is devoted to understanding the nature and magnitude of the interactions of climate and land use/cover change. Current projects include modeling food security and land cover changes in East Africa and Monsoon Asia. While a fellow at the International Livestock Research Institute, Nathan developed approaches to improve sensitivity of climate-land models to quantify drivers on semi-arid lands. Dr. Torbick develops and applies monitoring and assessment techniques to examine stressor - response relations largely using geospatial tools such as remote sensing, biogeochemical and climate models, web-GIS, and geostatistics. He is currently an active member of NASA, NIH, USDA, and World Bank projects as a Senior Research Scientist at Applied GeoSolutions. Please feel free to contact him with any questions or comments. Read this article

 

 

 

Nathan Moore

Nathan Moore, Assistant Professor, Michigan State University and Zhejiang University

Dr. Moore’s expertise is in land-atmosphere interactions, regional   climate modeling and mesoscale dynamics. His overall research interests lie in climate-society interactions and understanding impacts of human activity on the hydrologic cycle at regional and global scales. Dr. Moore is engaged in crop-landscape-atmospheric modeling in China, the Amazon, and East Africa, where he is integrating land cover/land use change and climate models for a variety of applications. In East Africa, Dr. Moore is examining  climate patterns and related changes in Glossina spp. (tsetse fly) distribution. He is also working on validating simulations with satellite, surface, and other observations, particularly Integrated high-resolution satellite imagery and remotely sensed land-cover data with a regional climate model (RAMS). He has also developed one-dimensional groundwater models of advection-diffusion for Everglades Nutrient Removal Project, and is working to apply these approaches in eastern China to determine contaminant flow and to match observations collected in the Yangtze River delta. Read this article.

 

 

 

Nick Kouchoukos

Global Head of Agricultural and Forestry Research, Thompson Reuters

As President of Lanworth Nick provides analytical and technical oversight for Lanworth’s natural resource intelligence operations. Trained in geography and the social sciences, he has twenty years’ experience in the application of remote sensing and geospatial analysis to monitoring agro-forest production. Nick has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships to support field and laboratory research in the United States, Europe, South America, and the Middle East. Prior to joining Lanworth, he held faculty positions at The University of Alabama at Birmingham and The University of Chicago. Nick received his education at Yale University. A recognized industry expert, he has been quoted in major media outlets including Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Dow Jones, Bloomberg News, The Chicago Tribune, Wired magazine, Futures magazine, Agribusiness Dairyman, and Max Armstrong’s This Week in Agribusiness. Read this article

 

 

 

Daniel Osgood

Lead Scientist, Financial Instruments Sector Team - International Research Institute for Climate and Society, Columbia University

Daniel Osgood brings advances in the use of climate information and financial mechanisms to improve livelihoods in developing countries. His Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California at Berkeley addressed the use of weather information in irrigated agriculture. He has been involved in insurance design and evaluation for development and adaptation oriented index insurance pilots in over a dozen countries, breaking barriers in index insurance through products with high take up and dramatic scaling. Tens of thousands of smallholder farmers have purchased contracts he has helped design in farmer-driven processes. Research contributions include work on the use of probabilistic information in decisionmaking, the valuation of environmental features, the use of remote sensing proxies in quantifying environmental amenities and environmental risk, the value of information in negotiation and markets, how uncertainty, risk, and information impacts negotiations between players, and work specific to index insurance, climate information, adaptation, and economic development. He has been awarded several million dollars of funding for his work. He has been involved in global policy processes such as the COP and GHF meetings and his work has received attention in popular press outlets such as the Guardian, Nature, the New York Times, and Reuters. Read this article

 

 

 

Carlos Arce

Senior Economist, The World Bank

Carlos Enrique Arce is a Senior Economist at the Agriculture and Rural Development Department at the World Bank. He is currently involved as member of the Agricultural Risk Management Team in providing technical assistance on Agriculture Risk Management to public and private sectors in various countries of Latin America and Africa. Trained as a lawyer and economist, he has worked for over 20 years in agricultural policy, agriculture competitiveness, agricultural trade policy, and more recently in a range of issues related to agricultural risk management, including the design of indexed based agricultural insurance in various countries of Latin America. Read this article

 

 

 

Andries Rosema

General Director, EARS 

Graduated from Delft Technical University, Department of Technical Earth Sciences in 1971. 35 years experience in remote sensing. General director of EARS and senior remote sensing expert in the field of energy and water balance monitoring and related hydrological and food security applications. Has been leading a range of international cooperation projects, including EU Framework Programme.  Andries is honorary member of the Netherlands Society for Earth Observation and Geo-informatics. Read this article

 

 

 

Kees van ‘t Klooster 

Project Director Africa - Alterra, Wageningen University and Research

Dr. Kees van ‘t Klooster (1956) was born and raised on a mixed Dutch farm. He has worked extensively in agriculture and livestock research and development in all continents. In his present position as Project Director Africa at Alterra, Wageningen University and Research Centre his emphasis is currently on development of agriculture in Africa for both public and private parties, where the extensive experience of his organisation on GIS and its applications within agriculture and risk management is shared with his partners. Capacity building, policy and investment advice. He published many refereed, technical and general articles on his work. Read this article

Contact: [email protected] 

 

 

 

Claire Jacobs

Project Leader, IWRM Team, Alterra-Wageningen UR

Ir. Claire Jacobs (1973) graduated at the Department of Irrigation and Water Engineering of Wageningen University. She is working ALTERRA, Wageningen University and Research and is involved in various agricultural water management studies. She coordinated and participated in international projects related to the use of Remote Sensing and GIS in agriculture. She organized several training courses on the use of RS and GIS. Claire Jacobs worked in semi-arid areas in Mediterranean countries, Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Ukraine, India and Chile and can be reached in Zambia. Read tharticle.

Contact [email protected]

Clare Jacobs

 

 

 

Jim Verdin

International Program Ma, United States Geological Survey (USGS)

Jim Verdin is a Scientist and Project Manager for the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center. In 2007, he was named to serve a two-year term as Deputy Director of the new National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) Program Office in Boulder, Colorado. His research interests lie with the use of remote sensing and geospatial modeling methods to address questions of hydrology, agriculture, and hydroclimatic hazards. Jim has led USGS activities in support of USAID’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network since 1995. He has extensive experience in geographic characterization of drought hazards for food security assessment in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Jim is also active in advancing the use of remote sensing for drought early warning in the U.S., in partnership with the National Drought Mitigation Center. Prior to joining USGS, he worked eleven years with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Jim has B.S. (University of Wisconsin, Madison) and M.S. (Colorado State University) degrees in civil and environmental engineering, and a Ph.D. (University of California, Santa Barbara) in geography.