Dr. Ali Montazar has a Ph.D. in Irrigation and Drainage and currently is an Irrigation and Water Management Advisor with the University of California Cooperative Extension. Dr. Montazar has more than 20 years of research, extension, teaching, and technical consulting experience. He has served in several leadership positions in agricultural water management and irrigation engineering and has contributed to the progress and completion of many projects in California and abroad. He has a well-developed applied research and training program in southern California, and currently has several ongoing irrigation and water conservation studies in alfalfa, avocados, carrots, date palm, spinach, lettuce, sweet corn, sugar beets, onions, and wine grapes. His focus is sensor-based irrigation management, on-farm water conservation, drainage and salinity management, and best irrigation and nutrient management practices.

Professor XIONG Youcai is a leading scientist in new material research & development regarding dryland agriculture and ecosystem conservation at Lanzhou University, northwest China. In his academic career, he has published over 200 papers or books (chapters) in international top journals. He has been engaged in fundamental research and technology innovation in agricultural systems and rural communities in semiarid and arid areas over the last two decades. Some of his research work had been published in international journals such as Advances in Agronomy, Biology and Fertility of Soils, Resource Conservations & Recycling, Journal of Hazardous Materials, Journal of Cleaner Production, Environmental Pollution, Agricultural and Forest Meteorology and Field Crops Research. In recent more than ten years, he also aimed to enhance the research and extension of new materials in dryland water-saving farming systems for small household farmers in developing countries such as Kenya, Pakistan, Sudan, and Ethiopia.

Mr. Javier Plaza Martin graduated in Environmental Sciences in 2016 and Agricultural Engineering in 2018, both cases from the University of Salamanca (Spain). He became a full-time Agronomist after finishing his Master's Degree in Agronomic Engineering in 2020 at the University of Salamanca. Since 2019, he has been working as a researcher on different Projects at the University of Salamanca, mainly related to the application of remote sensing techniques to agricultural and livestock systems. In 2021, He finished his Master's in Advanced Multivariate Data Analysis and Big Data at the University of Salamanca. In addition to his dedication to research projects, he works as Associate Professor at the Faculty of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences of the University of Salamanca, attached to the Department of Construction and Agronomy. Since May 2022, he is a Ph.D. in Agrobiotechnology, focusing his doctoral thesis on the study of new strategies based on Geotechnologies for application in Agriculture and Precision livestock farming.

Raphael was born in Contagem, Brazil. He graduated in Biological Sciences at Instituto Federal de Minas Gerais (Brazil) with an exchange program at Xavier University of Louisiana (USA) through Brazil's Science Without Borders program. He has a master's degree in Human Ecology from Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium) through the Flemish Interuniversity Council for University Development Cooperation (VLIR-UOS) program, with research on cultural ecosystem services and ecotourism development in protected areas. His experience as an early-career researcher is based on sustainable development, ecology, education, conservation and management of natural resources, and sustainable heritage approaches. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Tech4Culture program at the University of Turin (Italy) where his research addresses landscape ecology methods and assessment, and their recognition as cultural heritage.