Dr Feroza Morris is the first in her family to earn a PhD.

Growing up, university was not a common topic of conversation among Morris’s friends or in her community. Her mother, however – a nurse who interacted with graduates – wanted similar academic opportunities for her children.

“She was the one with high expectations but it was difficult for her to show us how to get there,” said Morris. That changed when University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) representatives visited her high school to introduce learners to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) degrees. “Those talks sparked my interest, and more than that, made university feel like something I could actually do,” she said.

Morris plunged into her studies and was ultimately awarded a PhD in Environmental Science from UKZN for research that investigated whether South Africa’s rivers could be measured from space, particularly in the Maloti-Drakensberg area, an important source of water for millions of people. Titled: ‘Streamflow Modelling and Forecasting using Machine Learning and Remote Sensing for Mountainous Catchments’, she was supervised by Dr Michele Toucher and Dr Silas Ngetar.

“Most of South Africa’s water comes from a few small mountain areas, and those are exactly the places where we have the least monitoring networks,” she said.

Morris elaborated: river gauges are expensive to install and maintain in steep, rugged areas because they get damaged or vandalised; all this while the national monitoring network has been shrinking for years. The Maloti-Drakensberg is one such area where water is pumped over the escarpment to Gauteng homes, industry and power stations, and, through the Mooi River, it also reaches Durban and Pietermaritzburg.

Morris used satellite data and machine learning to investigate whether these rivers could be monitored remotely.

“Satellites fly over every few days recording rainfall, soil moisture and how the land is changing – and that data is free. I used machine learning to work out the relationship between what the satellites estimate and how much water is actually flowing in the river,” she explained.

She stressed that satellites would not replace gauges, which are still needed to check models against measurements on the ground. They offered, however, a way to keep monitoring catchments, particularly where no gauge exists.

Her research is significant because the usual way of modelling a river requires years of measurements from that river to set the model up, which is challenging in catchments that have never been measured.

Morris built and tested the machine learning models at Cathedral Peak, a rare mountain catchment with good records going back to 1948, before applying the same approach to the much bigger, dam-controlled uThukela catchment at Spioenkop, where monitoring is sparse.

“Machine learning models are often dismissed as a black box that produces good numbers without explaining anything, but my research showed that machine learning models were able to learn how the catchment actually behaves, from satellite data alone,” she said.

Her interest in the field grew from a love of fieldwork and finding meaning in data, as well as her fascination with artificial intelligence. Her master’s research also introduced her to the Drakensberg.

“Being privileged to drive up through those steep passes and see that scenery and clear water changed how I thought about my work,” she said. “It is nothing short of majestic, for me, the beauty of God’s creation.”

As a lecturer in UKZN’s Discipline of Geography, Morris now hopes to bring the human dimension into her research, recognising that water is never solely a hydrological problem. She plans to carry that same concern into her planned Higher Education studies, examining how postgraduate students critically evaluate AI tools when combining physical and social data.

Her journey was supported by her mother, grandmother, aunt, husband, in-laws, supervisors, colleagues, friends and the South African Environmental Observation Network (SAEON).

A mother of two, Morris spends much of her spare time with her children and returns to Wentworth at weekends to be with her extended family.

Reflecting on her journey as a Coloured woman from the south Durban Basin community, she hopes her story will inspire others.

“I was never the smartest person in the room, and I never fit the mould but persistence and hope in God carried me,” she said. “Feeling like you do not belong somewhere is not proof that you should not be there. You were not sent to fit in. You were sent to make room.”

Words: Sally Frost

Photograph: Albert Hirasen