Bio

Pablo is a postdoctoral fellow in the IRES Food Sovereignty Lab with Dr. Hannah Wittman, cross-appointed with Dr. Khanh Dao Duc’s lab in the Department of Mathematics. His current work focuses on improving estimates of greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural landscapes in Canada, in partnership with non-academic stakeholders through an NSERC Alliance grant. The project develops tools that let farmers calculate their emissions on the LiteFarm platform, assesses the uncertainty and sensitivity of current models, and draws on new data to improve them. A second line of his research examines how to measure agrobiodiversity: which metrics best capture its change at local, national, and global scales, and how these differ from the ecological approaches traditionally used to measure wild biodiversity.

For the past eight years, Pablo has studied the implementation and outcomes of Sembrando Vida, Mexico’s agroforestry-based reforestation program, which employs nearly half a million small-scale farmers to establish agroforestry systems on their own land. He is a co-founder of the Comunidad de Aprendizaje Científico Alebrije, a research group of 12 scholars studying the program.

Pablo’s commitment to small-scale farmers has led him to develop appropriate rainwater harvesting and biogas technologies, study the Maya milpa system of the Yucatan Peninsula, and produce the first national-level, high-resolution map of small-scale farms in Mexico. This work also demonstrated how strongly the definition of “small-scale” shapes agricultural and food systems policy.