The American Geophysical Union has awarded the 2026 Open Science Recognition Prize to the Decentralized Damage Mapping Group, an international research team co-founded by Oregon State University Professor Jamon Van Den Hoek and postdoctoral scholar Corey Scher.
The prestigious award is in recognition of DDMG’s contributions of satellite mapping data of regions beset by war, conflict or natural disasters to the public sphere, particularly to aid in humanitarian response and provide journalists with up-to-date information.
Van Den Hoek is a professor of geography in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, where he leads the Conflict Ecology Lab, and Scher is a postdoctoral researcher in the lab. OSU doctoral student Zhanpei Fang is also a member of DDMG, along with nine other scientists, journalists, humanitarian workers and open-source investigators in the U.S. and five other countries.
Over the past few years, DDMG has been featured in prominent media outlets for its mapping work demonstrating the scale of destruction in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, Lebanon and Israel, as well as for its efforts to disseminate accurate and timely maps of urban and environmental damage, despite state-led embargoes and delays in releasing satellite imagery for some conflict zones.
Though it’s not the same as the conventional “open science” definition of posting data on GitHub for anyone to use, sharing mapping assessments with journalists and humanitarian organizations is about increasing awareness of catastrophic events and getting everyone on the same page, Van Den Hoek said.
“In the short- and long-term, we are trying to provide data that give us a shared approximation of reality,” he said. “Let’s at least all be talking about the same maps.”
If everyone is using the same map, it provides a solid starting point for groups on all sides — not just political groups, but industry, community organizations and local governments — to start moving forward on discussions and solutions, he said.
DDMG operates on a two-way street: Members are in regular dialogue with the journalists and aid organizations that use its data to ensure both that the data is useful to those users, and that it is accurate to what locals are seeing on the ground in a given region.
“There’s a strong kind of customer service ethos to this work, where we’re saying, ‘Any questions you have, let us know, and we’ll do our best to reply to you,’” Van Den Hoek said. “Even if you have bespoke analysis that you want, let us know. We may have already done it or may have an interest in doing it.”
The AGU award follows the 2025 Earth Observation Excellence Award presented to DDMG last year from the European Space Agency.
Van Den Hoek is gratified by the recognition from AGU. DDMG has spent the past several years building a presence at the annual meetings with discussions uniting researchers across a wide scope of scientific disciplines and career stages.
“It’s also gratifying to be able to show there are different ways of doing open science that has a far reach, other than the standard way of making your dataset public after the paper is published,” he said.
With the $10,000 award, DDMG plans to invest in data communications infrastructure and in-person outreach and training events with humanitarian groups at the Humanitarian Networking and Partnerships Week in Geneva in March. This will build on their efforts to forge new relationships and keep the group’s work as relevant and helpful to end users as possible, Van Den Hoek said.
“This is not in any way a stagnant space,” he said.
DDMG and other honorees will be recognized at AGU’s 2026 annual meeting in December, when more than 25,000 attendees from over 100 countries will convene in San Francisco and online. The awards recognize groundbreaking achievements that illustrate science’s continual advancement, inspiring the AGU community with their stories and successes.
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