Doctoral Candidate Wins Prestigious Inaugural Fellowship for Soil and Climate Research in Africa

We are proud to share that Xylem Lab's own Adebowale Daniel Adebayo has been awarded the inaugural Dr. Jingli Yang and Dr. Peter Li Endowed Distinguished Fellowship from the Department of Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland. The fellowship was announced at the Department's 2026 Annual Awards Ceremony, where Adebowale was recognized alongside postdoctoral recipients Haijun Li and Xinyuan Li.

Doctoral Candidate Adebowale Daniel Adebayo with Prof. Kathleen Stewart at the Department of Geographical Sciences 2026 Annual Awards Ceremony.

So what does Adebowale actually work on? In simple terms, he is trying to use satellite soil moisture data to predict crop failure before it happens, and the results are promising. His recent work, using NASA's SMAP root-zone soil moisture data and deep learning, showed that it is possible to detect crop failure in Eastern and Southern Africa 32 days earlier than traditional methods. During the 2024 El Niño season, his model mapped the crop failure footprint roughly a month in advance, reduced forecast errors by 22-24%, and showed the strongest gains in water-limited, semi-arid farming regions. To be clear, the model did not predict El Niño itself, but rather identified where and how badly crops would be stressed before that stress became visible in the vegetation. For farmers and decision-makers who need time to respond, this kind of early warning can make all the difference.

To make satellite data more reliable, he collects on-the-ground measurements across various farming environments, checking and improving what the satellites tell us. The goal here is to understand how soil, water, and plants interact, and what that means when climate shocks, including droughts or floods, hit smallholder farmers who have very little room for error. This new fellowship, established through a $1 million gift, will give him the dedicated time and resources to push this research even further.

Advised by Dr. Catherine Nakalembe, Adebowale's work is a great example of what the Xylem Lab stands for: using Earth observation to answer questions that matter to real people on the ground.

Read the new preprint article here: Adebayo, Adebowale Daniel, and Nakalembe, Catherine, “Forecasting agricultural drought impacts on crop productivity using satellite soil moisture in water-limited environments”.