Ricardo Rodriguez Iglesias is a professor and research scientist currently based in Bahía Blanca (Argentina), a coastal city close to where the grasslands of the Pampas meet the shrublands of northern Patagonia.

He has mostly followed a 50:50 teaching:research path throughout an academic career occasionally punctuated by public service duty for the Argentinean congress and national and provincial administrations and agencies, and consulting for both public and private parties in Argentina and abroad. He has taught regularly at undergraduate and occasionally graduate and professional levels for 30+ years, mostly in the areas of ruminant production, breeding, behaviour and grazing in arid and semi-arid environments. Regardless of that background, he sees himself more like an analyst cum modeller rather than a true scientist. He has received regular grant support and published quite modestly.

Research themes, shared with a number of colleagues and graduate and undergraduate students, have revolved around probabilistic modelling of vegetation change under human intervention, goals and ML algorithms for ecology-based quantitative methods for zoning of protected natural areas, and behavioural conditioning of seasonal reproduction, diet selection, and spatial use of grazing lands by ruminants.

The phantom thread stitching together those research patches is a deep interest in contributing to balance the human act on our shared environment. He feels feeding the world is not optional, but we ought to recover, nevertheless, from the bloodshed inflicted on biodiversity, and turn around the persistent soil loss inaugurated with the Neolithic revolution. In his view, the book of Genesis is not a story of lost paradises; it is rather a Bronze Age witness account of the potential environmental damage of unbridled human intervention. Greener ways of using croplands and grazing lands are urgently needed to restore biodiversity and preserve soil stability. Those are, arguably, the bend or break challenges of our generation.

Ricardo was born (1955) and raised in Uruguay (ask Homer Simpson, he knows where that country is) but he comes from a long lineage of small-holding farmers/shepherds of the highlands of southern Galicia, in Spain’s northwest corner. He still enjoys growing his own food. He also remains curious and intrigued by the apparently inexhaustible variability surrounding us all, and by how much of that may turn out to be inherently random and beyond reach.