u/Gloomy-Apartment1073

https://preview.redd.it/jl6gwim1miih1.png?width=3686&format=png&auto=webp&s=3d238d80661e1c4d5c781b43c7f3c162cb279260

Two health datasets went up on GeoAlgeria this week, and the most useful thing I can tell you is what they cannot do.

Pharmacies: 3,797 mapped across 67 of the 69 wilayas, from an OpenStreetMap extract taken on 8 August. That is roughly 35% of an estimated 11,000 officines, so it is a real map with a real hole in it. 3,509 records sit on the pharmacy itself because somebody surveyed it, and are drawn as pins. 288 sit on their commune point instead and are drawn as dots, so a dot means the town and not the door. 146 carry a phone number. 257 publish opening hours, and the rest are unknown rather than closed.

What it will never tell you from open data is which pharmacy is de garde tonight. That rotation is decided week by week and wilaya by wilaya by the health directorates and the pharmacists' syndicates, announced locally, and published nowhere as a feed. If anyone here has a wilaya-level source that is actually machine readable, I want to see it.

The health map taught me something. The plan was to publish Algeria's private clinics from OSM's clinic tag. 1,702 elements, easy. Then I read them: about 283 are polycliniques, which are public EPSP facilities. About 180 more are dispensaires, centres de santé or salles de soins. Twelve records in the entire extract say who operates the place. In Algerian usage a clinique is usually private, but mappers also reach for that word when nothing better fits, so the tag holds labs, dialysis centres and school health units too.

There was no private-clinics registry in there, so I did not publish one. What went up is 1,894 care facilities classified by kind, sitting beside the Ministry of Health's own register of 600 public establishments, as two layers that are never added together. One is official and closed, the other partial and volunteer-made. Summing them would invent a national total nobody has measured.

The register has its own gap worth knowing: it reaches 58 wilayas, 95 of its establishments carry no usable location, and its records are still keyed to the pre-2026 wilayas, so not one of the eleven new wilayas has a record of its own.

Data is ODbL with attribution to OpenStreetMap, in JSON, CSV, GeoJSON and TypeScript. The packages are geoalgeria/cliniques and geoalgeria/pharmacies on npm (written without the @ so Reddit does not read them as user mentions).

What would help most: open your wilaya and tell me what is wrong. Bir El Ater and El Aricha currently have nothing mapped in either layer, and anything missing can be added straight to OpenStreetMap, where it lands on the map at the next refresh.

With the wildfires Algeria is facing right now, I’ve been looking into what technology could realistically do to help — not only once a fire gets out of control, but before it starts and during its early stages.

As a software and digital solutions engineer, I came across a research project called WIFIRE / Firemap, and I found the concept particularly interesting.

It’s not simply a map showing where fires are happening.

The system brings together multiple sources of data — weather stations, satellites, cameras, historical fires, sensors and geographic data — into a GIS-based platform designed to support near-real-time wildfire modeling and prediction.

One of its most interesting capabilities is fire-spread simulation.

You can define the initial perimeter of a fire and combine it with variables such as wind speed and direction, temperature, humidity and weather forecasts. The system then models how the fire could spread and visualizes predicted fire perimeters along with estimated arrival times.

That made me wonder:

Could we build something inspired by this specifically for Algeria?

Not necessarily a massive national system from day one. We could start with an open prototype that gradually combines:

• Satellite hotspot/fire detections
• Weather, wind and humidity data
• Terrain and elevation
• Forest and vegetation/fuel data
• Historical wildfire data
• Verified geolocated fire reports
• Eventually, cameras, sensors, drones and operational data where available

The first version could simply answer:

Where is the wildfire risk highest today?

Then:

Can we detect a possible ignition as early as possible?

And eventually, when a fire is active:

Where is it likely to spread over the next 30 minutes, 1 hour or several hours? Which villages, roads or infrastructure could be threatened?

The Firemap research itself demonstrates this layered approach, including satellite thermal detections, weather stations, historical fires and vegetation/fuel information as GIS layers.

Of course, building a nice dashboard is the easy part.

Building something reliable enough to support real emergency decisions requires accurate local data, wildfire and forestry expertise, meteorology, GIS, remote sensing, validation of prediction models, and especially cooperation with the relevant authorities.

But I think the technical feasibility is worth exploring.

A significant part could potentially be built using open-source technologies and existing Earth-observation/open datasets, while gradually integrating better Algerian data where available.

I’d particularly love to hear from Algerians working in GIS, remote sensing, meteorology, AI/data science, forestry, Civil Protection or wildfire research:

What relevant data do we actually have access to in Algeria? What are we missing? And how realistic would it be to build a useful prototype?

If there are enough developers, researchers and domain experts interested in this, maybe this is something worth exploring as an open-source Algerian project, rather than leaving it as just another idea after every wildfire season.