Fernando Miguez was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and before coming to Iowa State was a a post-doc at the Energy Bioscience Institute (University of Illinois) working on developing general mathematical models for biomass crops. He has received a M.S. and Ph.D. in Crop Sciences and a M.S. in Applied Statistics, all from the University of Illinois. The research is integrative, involving crop physiology, agronomy, soils, mathematical modeling, statistics and applied spatial analysis with the goal of producing reliable predictions of cropping systems’ productivity, stability and ecosystem services.
The ultimate objective of our lab is to enhance productivity, stability and sustainability of cropping systems for food, feed and fuel in an environmental, social and economic context.
Our approach is to:
- create and analyze databases of crop performance,
- integrate field experimentation with statistical and process-based crop models and
- to produce spatial forecasts of productivity, stability and ecosystem services of cropping systems.
In our research we use a variety of methods:
- meta-analysis,
- linear, non-linear and generalized mixed models,
- process-based crop models,
- meteorological, soil and land-use databases,
- parameter estimation,
- spatial analysis.