Aiding Africa
UM Satellite Science Helps Algeria Battle Climate Change
By Emily Senkosky
In an unlikely scientific alliance that bridges continents, UM researchers joined forces with North Africa and NASA to convert satellite data into practical agricultural knowledge to aid communities impacted by climate change.
North Africa is one of the regions most impacted by rising global temperatures, causing an alarming increase in extreme drought. In Algeria these costs are especially pronounced, with both people and their growing agricultural economy impacted by the dwindling rainfall and increasing risks of environmental, material and human damage.
UM research, financially backed by NASA and in collaboration with one key Algerian Ph.D. student, is bolstering this region’s defense against these climate change-driven natural disasters.
The collaboration between scientists in Montana and Algeria for NASA came about thanks to a serendipitous connection. Arthur Endsley, an assistant research professor with UM’s Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group in the W. A. Franke College of Forestry and Conservation, is the principal investigator on this UM-Algeria collaborative project.
Endsley became connected to Walid Ouaret, an Algerian doctoral student at the University of Maryland, through a former colleague at NASA. The two later applied for a NASA grant and were awarded funding for their project titled “Engaging with Open Science for Agriculture Using NASA Climate Data.”
A melding of minds and nationalities, the project will help improve agriculture, food security and environmental and human resilience in the face of our quickly changing world. Endsley says access to NASA data is a game-changer for any environmental scientist, but especially for those who work in research that involves modeling complex aspects of earth systems. The UM-Algeria collaborative work spans a huge spectrum of data — from remote satellite data to ground-floor insights from farmers who work the land every day.
“Overall, we needed a through-line from publicly available raw data to a practical result,” Endsley says. “This open science curriculum is something that we couldn’t have done without working together.”
Their project culminated in a four-day workshop hosted in Algeria last year that brought together international researchers, engineers and scientists to enhance understanding of open science principles, applying NASA climate datasets to real-world agricultural challenges. The event highlighted the global significance of addressing complex environmental issues like drought and agricultural yield prediction — problems being experienced from Montana to Africa and around the globe.
Endsley says science is now going through what is known as a “reproducibility crisis,” where studies cannot be replicated by other researchers because data is not shared easily across borders. In a globalized world, this is undermining the credibility of scientific findings.
To mitigate this, NASA in 2020 created the Transform to Open Science program, an initiative designed to rapidly transform agencies, organizations and communities to an inclusive culture of open science. Shortly afterwards, the White House followed suit and designated 2023 the Year of Open Science. Collectively, U.S. federal agencies such as NASA have started deploying tactics to bolster their open science by incorporating practices that can help lead to reproducible and transparent scientific outcomes.
The project led by Endsley and Ouaret fits right into this effort, aiming to enhance the accessibility and usefulness of global satellite data and other products by incorporating local insights and validating them on the ground. Their project is designed for mutual benefit to all stakeholders, including farmers, data scientists and governmental entities.
By leveraging satellite data and modeling for local land cover conditions, including different crops and management practices, and for regional weather conditions such as temperature, precipitation and even soil moisture, their research can improve remote sensing information for those with their boots on the ground and their hands in the earth. This helps them better adapt to changing environmental factors. These modeling systems, on a broader level, also can help enhance food and water security by training local scientists and user communities on the best use of data products.
NTSG Director John Kimball helped advise the proposal. He says it aligns with their group mission to advance remote sensing for ecological applications, and he emphasized the importance of collaborating with local partners to develop more effective data products and applications. He says when local practitioners can use products, it creates a feedback loop that enhances their utility for future applications.
The project includes providing technical expertise and adapting global data products to local needs with the deliverable outcomes, including product user guides, software and tutorials in the local language — or in the case of Algeria, languages, which are Arabic, French and Algerian Berber.
“We’re always looking for observations on the ground to help us validate data products,” Kimball says. “But with developing countries, there can be a bottleneck or technical challenge. Part of what makes this project so impactful is that it makes data more accessible and useful to these underrepresented communities.”
This cross-continent, interdisciplinary collaboration will be critical for the progression of climate change science and the core competencies in data literacy needed to study it. These were the principal objectives of the four-day workshop led by Endsley, Ouaret and Ghiles Kaci of Algeria’s University of Boumerdès. The Center for Research on Economic Applications and Development funded the 2024 workshop and, thanks to Ouaret’s network in Algeria, they fostered an important discourse on open science.
Navigating the cultural and institutional landscape in Algeria posed unique challenges for the UM-Algeria team. Local gatekeepers, often wary of foreign interventions, can be hesitant to embrace external collaborations, particularly in sensitive areas like data sharing. To overcome this barrier, the team prioritized fostering trust and mutual respect, engaging closely with local NGOs and researchers who acted as critical bridges to affected communities.
“It’s about finding common ground,” Ouaret says. “Both sitting down and starting from the same problem locally and then building solutions together.”
The workshop also addressed practical concerns such as traversing institutional resistance to data sharing, ensuring data credit for researchers and bridging technical skill gaps in climate science. A lynchpin to this was navigating the nuances of geopolitical relations with Algeria, which Ouaret says was a multifaceted journey. What started as a conversation back in 2022 and required much negotiation eventually manifested into the workshop in 2024. A relationships-first approach not only enriched the project’s outcomes but also set a foundation for continued partnerships, including collaborative publications and localized solutions tailored to Algeria’s unique challenges.
Access to NASA’s cloud resources were central to the workshop’s success, allowing attendees to download data on the fly from their own computers. The workshop was open source and hands-on to help scientists build skills in workflows, project management and scientific computing.
Through practical exercises, attendees learned how to access, analyze, visualize and manage large, complex, climate datasets, gaining insights into tools like the programming language Python. Although the coursework spanned global and local context, it also incorporated relevant case studies, such as a recent drought in Tiaret, Algeria, to help participants directly connect theoretical knowledge to practical agricultural applications.
Overall, the aim of the workshop was to empower local scientists to conduct open and reproducible research, contributing to sustainable development in Algeria. The hopes for both Endsley and Ouaret are that other countries can follow in Algeria’s footsteps.
“The goal is to give communities agency — to enable them to use these resources and materials to approach climate challenges with confidence,” Endsley says. “Our hope is for any scientist, Algerian, American, whoever to be able to train themselves in and conduct open science.”
By integrating global data products with local perspectives, the multinational team created a framework that helps researchers from diverse backgrounds collaborate on solutions to shared global challenges — transcending borders for a more inclusive and accessible culture of science.
“To see this workshop come together was amazing,” Ouaret says. “It showed that science truly has no limits.” •
