Research Assistants - Crop Data Consortium

Project Summary

Accelerating climate change and deepening food insecurity are intensifying pressures on livelihoods and threatening progress toward global development goals. Over the past five decades, Earth Observation (EO) technologies have expanded our ability to monitor agricultural systems, yet their full potential remains unrealized. A key constraint is the lack of harmonized, high-quality ground-based crop data that can be integrated with EO at field and crop-specific scales. Major international organizations such as the World Bank (WB), IFPRI, and CGIAR maintain extensive agricultural survey archives, but publicly released datasets are often anonymized, spatially jittered, or aggregated to protect human subjects. These practices limit their utility for high-resolution EO validation, yield modeling, and causal analysis.

This project, funded by the Global Research Institute, addresses these gaps by establishing a harmonized, open-access Global Crop Database that consolidates and standardizes survey-based crop data through a community-driven consortium. By integrating standardized global crop databases with agronomic and ecological metadata—such as soils, agroecological zones, and climate variables—the database will enable cross-national, cross-decadal analysis and predictive modeling to inform policy, development interventions, and climate resilience strategies.

Position Summary

The Crop Data Consortium invites applications from W&M students for two temporary, fall-semester fellowships with potential extension to the spring of 2027. Through this fellowship, students will partner with Principal Investigator (PI) Kunwar Singh (AidData), Co-PI Ariel BenYishay (Economics, AidData), and staff at AidData and GRI on cutting-edge geospatial research, including research design, data collection and analysis, and manuscript preparation. The objective of this fellowship is to develop and apply critical geospatial skills for academic and non-academic careers.

This position is for a maximum of 10 hours per week during the Fall 2026 semester. Pay range is a minimum of $12.77 per hour.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Building a crop data consortium
• Compile, harmonize, and document in-situ crop type datasets, contributing to the development of a standardized and interoperable crop database.
• Develop and apply geospatial workflows to integrate in-situ crop observations with Earth observation and ancillary datasets.
• Develop, implement, and evaluate QA/QC protocols to improve the accuracy, consistency, and usability of global in-situ crop data.

‍Required Qualifications

• Candidates must be currently enrolled as undergraduate or graduate students at William & Mary
• Candidates should have successfully completed coursework in Geospatial Science (i.e., remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems - GIS) and have advanced skills in geospatial analysis with a text-based interface (i.e., R, GEE, Python).
• Prior experience with Python is needed
• Experience working with time series spatial data (e.g., remotely sensed imagery, in-situ observations)

Preferred Qualifications

• Programming in Python
• Previous experience working with interdisciplinary research teams
• Knowledge of open-source datasets and consortia