About
About Maria
I'm Maria Solis, PhD (publishing as Maria Solis-Aulestia), an agricultural economist based in Innisfail, Queensland. As Principal Consultant & Owner of AgroSol since October 2024, I bring together economics, climate science and geospatial analysis to help Australian agriculture make better decisions.
My experience spans levy analysis, industry impact assessment, economic impact assessments of research investments, regional economic (input-output) modelling and biosecurity economics across cotton, grains, livestock industries and sugarcane, including experience working with Australia's Rural Research and Development Corporations (RDCs). Alongside that, I develop WRF/GFS-based climate and evapotranspiration forecasting, and have published methods for classifying evapotranspiration climates using numerical weather prediction, AI and remote sensing.
From 2022 to 2024 I worked as Extension Officer at Innisfail District Canegrowers, working directly with growers on practice change, productivity and sustainability. Before that I was Principal Extension Agronomist at Innisfail Babinda Cane Productivity Services (2021–2022), and Researcher & Lecturer at Yachay Tech University, Ecuador (2019–2020). That farm-level and research experience keeps my analysis practical and grounded in how farms actually operate.
2026 ASSCT President's Medal. At the 2026 ASSCT Annual Conference in Mackay I presented the peer-reviewed paper ‘Building emissions knowledge for the Australian sugarcane industry: A gap analysis’ and was awarded the President's Medal for best research paper.
International research collaboration
Since 2019 I've worked as an independent researcher in an international collaboration with researchers in Ecuador, Iceland and the United States, on the project ‘A New Methodology for Evaporation Classification based on AI’, supported by a Microsoft AI for Earth Azure grant. We use WRF weather modelling driven by global forecast data (GFS) to estimate hourly reference evapotranspiration (ETo) and classify regional ‘ETo climates’ with self-organising maps, with the aim of improving irrigation decision-making. I lead the WRF setup, ETo modelling and writing. The work has produced peer-reviewed papers at IGARSS (2022, 2023) and EGU (2022), and open-source code.
Qualifications
- PhD Agricultural Economics, University of Western Australia (2020)
- MSc Environmental Earth Science, James Cook University (2013)
- Bachelor of Science (Farming Science), Army University (ESPE), Ecuador (2011)
Let's work together
Whether you're designing a program, evaluating outcomes, preparing a tender or managing climate risk, I can help turn data into decisions.
Discuss a project →