Dr. Nico Hernandez-Aguilera is an applied researcher working at the intersection of climate risk, rural livelihoods, and geospatial data. His research addresses a persistent gap in climate and conservation action: many high-stakes decisions for smallholder farmers and landscape stewards require local, timely, decision-relevant information, yet monitoring systems are often too coarse, too costly, or too detached from lived experience to guide on-the-ground choices or the design of effective interventions and policies. As a result, evidence and analysis are frequently synthesized at aggregated scales, obscuring local climate hazard impacts and the soil, biodiversity, and other field conditions central to regenerative land management and climate adaptation.
To close this gap, he develops community-sensing and climate-service approaches that integrate farmer knowledge and perceptions with geospatial and climate data, translating local signals into actionable climate-risk information and decision support to advance sustainable farming and ecosystem resilience. In collaboration with the Yale Center for Geospatial Solutions (YCGS), he is building and expanding iKONICO, a community-sensing production platform that uses mobile messaging (e.g., SMS) and gamification to scale community-reported observations and combine them with satellite and weather-station data to support data elicitation and learning across rural contexts. His work spans Latin America, the Mediterranean, and Africa. He holds a Ph.D. in Applied Economics and Management from Cornell University and completed postdoctoral research in Climate Services and Climate Risk Management at Columbia University.