German Mandrini
Education: Ph.D. ’18, Cornell Advisor: Louis Longchamps, Soil and Crop Sciences
EDF Advisors: Emily Oldfield and Jocelyn Lavalee
German Mandrini is a 2024 EDF-Cornell Atkinson Joint Postdoc. He is an agricultural data scientist, working at the intersection of data science, agronomy, and finance. He comes from a family farm, and agriculture has guided much of his career. He holds a B.S. in agronomy, an M.S in agricultural economics, and a Ph.D. in crop sciences. He has more than ten years of experience working for different companies in the farming sector, including grain trading, input selling, farm management, and corn breeding.
Designing a Reliable and Scalable Sampling Strategy for Regional Soil Carbon Stock Monitoring
Proactive management of agricultural soils can sequester carbon, build soil health over time and contribute to climate mitigation, adaptation and long-term farm viability. Governments and private actors are creating carbon markets to encourage and pay farmers to adopt sustainable management practices, but they’re hampered by difficulties in verifying and quantifying changes in soil carbon levels. Researchers will leverage soil carbon data collected by EDF and collaborators and couple it with data from soil surveys, topography, remote sensing and land management records to define agricultural management zones and create digital soil mapping. This work aims to optimize strategies for surveying soil carbon, and thus improve reliability in carbon markets.