Pierre Hiernaux

Pierre Hiernaux was an Engineer in agronomy with from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Agriculture de Montpellier (ENSAM) in 1969 with a Ph.D. in vegetation ecology from the University of Montpellier in 1975. He is an expert in ecology and management of tropical rangelands and pastures, and Agricultural System Analyst. He has 30 years of professional experience in tropical Africa and authored or coauthored over 100 publications with an emphasis on plant ecology, range resource survey, applied remote sensing, and bioeconomic modeling of agricultural systems. Since 2005, he has been with Centre d'Etudes Spatiales de la Biosphère, Toulouse, France, under contract with the Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, in the framework of the international research project African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis. His research is focused on the characterization of the Earth's surface, including soil, soil humidity and vegetation, their dynamics, and on modeling the underlying processes.