<![CDATA[CIEE/ICEE - Living Data Stories]]>

<![CDATA[CIEE/ICEE - Living Data Stories]]>Tue, 12 May 2026 01:21:45 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[Sifting through seabirds: 45 years of murre monitoring]]>Tue, 17 Mar 2026 18:03:59 GMThttps://www.ciee-icee.ca/ldp-stories/sifting-through-seabirds-45-years-of-murre-monitoringData Rescue Intern: Laura Lardinois

In the coldest months of the year, I had the chance to step briefly away from my thesis and immerse myself in records of summers spent in Akpatuurjuaq,ᐊᑲᐸᑑᕋᔦᕋᑲ (Coats Island, Nunavut), much further north than I’ve ever been. This small island on the northern edge of the Hudson Bay has breeding colonies of thick-billed murres (Uria lomvia, akpa, ᐊᑲᐸ), which, thanks to decades of annual surveys, are the most well-studied in the world. These Arctic seabirds, which are in the same family as penguins and puffins, are culturally significant for Indigenous communities and serve as indicators of environmental change.

Field notebooks from the past few years (left) and paper logs (right) from the first 3 decades of monitoring (luckily, the data was already digitized for me)

Since the 1980s, teams of researchers from Environment and Climate Change Canada and McGill University have been going out to this remote island each summer to band birds, count population sizes, measure chick growth, observe feeding behaviour, and track reproductive success. This has generated huge quantities of valuable data, collected first on paper in the field, then entered into physical tables pre-Excel, then digitized in various spreadsheets and file types across the years. My job, as a data rescue intern with the Living Data Project, was to pick up where a previous intern left off a few years ago and wrangle these data into a clean, well-documented dataset that could be archived and made publicly available.

At first, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of files, not to mention the unfamiliar abbreviations, many tabs, and different information types. In some cases, having banded birds in a natural history course (thanks, Professor Trombulak!) came in handy when deciphering the data, but other information was more cryptic, especially without having been in the field to observe these murre colonies first-hand. Much like a novel starting in medias res, I was scrambling to get to know the cast of characters in these datasets, including not only the focal birds, but also the hundreds of observers who logged notes in field notebooks across four decades. Luckily, everyone who had been involved over the years was willing to help patch together their memories, including a memorable email sent from high elevations in the Himalayas to clarify chick hatching dates in the 1980s. I was also fortunate to visit the teams actively working on the project in person, spending a day at ECCC in Ottawa and another flipping through field notebooks and the original paper logs from 1981 through the early 2000s at McGill’s Mac Campus.

Little by little, I began to latch onto patterns in the data and link them to conversations with the researchers who have led these monitoring efforts. For instance, some datasets had negative date values, which were the product of early years being recorded as “date since June 1st”, since most of the breeding monitoring would start in June. However, in some years, crews came out early, resulting in -2 date values that needed to be converted back to May 29th. Through the field notes, I caught glimpses of the reality of field work on Coats Island: sighting polar bears could end a day of monitoring, and several monitoring plots were relocated due to too much bear activity. Bird counts or other observations could be cut short by bad weather and poor visibility.

Thick-billed murres, I learned as I tracked down hand-drawn maps of the study plots, nest on the very edge of rocky cliffs, effectively dotting the entire cliff face with black and white as they compete for prized nesting spots. Their eggs have a fun conical shape, which keeps them from rolling off the cliff. As I dug deeper into the data – and sent a slew of clarification emails to the amazing Coats Island research team – labels like “Q 37” changed from abstract alphanumeric codes to a specific nesting pair tucked into a crowded ledge.

Similarly, I learned to recognize the patterns of band IDs used to identify each bird: when caught, murres are banded with metal bands that have unique number codes to identify them when resighted or recaptured. In early years, bands had 8-digit codes starting with ‘996’, while recent years have switched to 9-digit codes. When they’re first banded, the complete band number is recorded, but sometimes, if you see the bird again through the binoculars, only parts of the band are visible, so I had to find ways to account for incomplete values. These band IDs are key, since they let us track an individual bird across time and link morphological data, its breeding site(s), potential partner(s), reproductive success, and any other data collected.

With so many moving pieces, making lists of files, the date ranges they cover, what information they contain, and how they’re linked to other files, was critical to preserving my sanity. I also learned the value of making a changelog early on, to keep track of any issues I came across or modifications I made in a systematic manner. Usually, catching and trying to fix one issue in the dataset would dig up several others in the process, so being able to flag these to return to later was extremely helpful. Furthermore, tracking these changes systematically – alongside well-annotated code of what I’ve done - will allow others to pick up where I leave off and hopefully continue archiving new versions of this dataset after this summer’s field season.

]]><![CDATA[Community-level invertebrate response to logging in British Columbia temperate rainforest]]>Tue, 17 Mar 2026 17:41:38 GMThttps://www.ciee-icee.ca/ldp-stories/community-level-invertebrate-response-to-logging-in-british-columbia-temperate-rainforestData rescue intern: Nicholas Hivon

UBC's Malcolm Knapp Research Forest is home to many long-term studies focused on the effects of timber harvesting and related human influences on the temperate rainforest ecosystem. Between the years of 1998-2008, pitfall traps were set out to monitor terrestrial invertebrate communities. Dr. John Richardson is studying response of these insects to various management strategies for timber harvesting. My role in the data rescue was to move the data from a variety of .xslx worksheets into a widely accessible format (.csv), clean and validate the data, and publish the dataset on Borealis.
Dataset link: https://doi.org/10.5683/SP3/BNBWAT

]]><![CDATA[American Badger Sightings and Mortality Locations in British Columbia]]>Tue, 17 Mar 2026 17:29:16 GMThttps://www.ciee-icee.ca/ldp-stories/american-badger-sightings-and-mortality-locations-in-british-columbiaData Rescue Intern: Lia Ferguson

During the winter of 2025/2026, I participated in a data rescue internship for the Ministry of Water Land and Resource Stewardship BC. During my internship, I prepared badger sightings and mortality data that had been contributed by citizens and program partners for over 30 years to be published in the BC Data Catalogue. I cleaned and compiled 8 datasets, validated the data and removed duplicates, wrote functions to process incoming data in the future, and helped with a long term data management plan for the project.
]]><![CDATA[Eelgrass Transplant Monitoring Data in the Salish Sea (SeaChange Marine Conservation Society)]]>Tue, 17 Mar 2026 17:19:00 GMThttps://www.ciee-icee.ca/ldp-stories/eelgrass-transplant-monitoring-data-in-the-salish-sea-seachange-marine-conservation-societyData Rescue Intern: MJ Herrin

In the winter of November 2025 - February 2026, I completed a Data Rescue Internship in collaboration with SeaChange Marine Conservation Society. SeaChange, a not-for-profit organization, works in partnership with coastal communities across Vancouver Island and the Salish Sea to conserve, restore, and protect nearshore coastal ecosystems, including seagrass meadows.

Eelgrass shoots, freshly collected and in the midst of being sorted & prepped for transplantation. Image taken during a SeaChange transplant in September 2025, when I was invited to participate in a transplant at Cadboro Bay, Victoria, BC.

For over 25 years, SeaChange has been conducting monitoring surveys and restoration efforts for seagrass beds at multiple sites along Vancouver Island and the Salish Sea. Over many years, they had accumulated a wealth of data that needed to be archived in a manner that allowed for versioning, as data collection is ongoing and will need to be updated over time. SeaChange collected monitoring data during dives along a transect to assess the health and density of seagrass beds. Environmental data was also collected via the installation of HOBO loggers at sites. At the start of the project, the data had been partially digitized in multiple different file formats, or was in a paper format across different boxes.

With help from undergraduate student Gloria Rahgozar (who digitized & entered over 5,000 paper entries!), I consolidated, cleaned, and combined all seagrass and subtidal monitoring datasheets into a final, usable format. I developed scripts to batch-clean the environmental data collected on multiple installed HOBO loggers and added numerical location keys to be able to tie this data to their seagrass monitoring efforts. I then developed a workflow and documentation to facilitate any future updates to the dataset, so that it can be versioned as needed. This first version of the dataset encapsulates years of seagrass metrics & environmental conditions collected from 40 sites between August 2015 and December 2023. As an openly available dataset on Zenodo, this SeaChange data can help restoration practitioners and researchers to study possible drivers of seagrass meadow decline or recovery after transplantation.

This internship was such a rewarding experience! It greatly helped me improve my data handling and management skills, and it was deeply inspirational to see the dedication and wealth of data that SeaChange had accumulated through community-led efforts for these coastal nearshore ecosystems.

Image credit: SeaChange Marine Conservation Society

]]><![CDATA[New Biodiversity Data using Old Fashioned Botanical Letters]]>Wed, 11 Feb 2026 16:55:37 GMThttps://www.ciee-icee.ca/ldp-stories/new-biodiversity-data-using-old-fashioned-botanical-lettersData Rescue Intern: Philippa Stone

Over the winter of 2025/2026, I completed the data rescue internship, “New Biodiversity Data using Old Fashioned Botanical Letters,” with Linda Jennings at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum at UBC.

John W. Eastham (1878-1968), was one of the most prolific of the early plant collectors in British Columbia. Eastham donated his specimen collection to the herbarium at UBC after his retirement as British Columbia’s Plant Pathologist (1914 -1947). The herbarium also holds a collection of his letters that contain valuable information about herbarium specimens and the state of taxonomy at the time of their writing, but the letters are fragile and some are beginning to disintegrate.

A herbarium specimen of Vaccinium ovatum collected on Lasqueti Island by Eastham in 1939 (V016477)

The second page of a letter from JW Eastham to Winifred Hardy, a botanist at the Royal British Columbia Museum, describing the population of Vaccinium ovatum on Lasqueti Island.

I worked with an undergraduate student, Seth Perez, to digitize the letters. We found that Eastham’s correspondence collection contained over 800 letters, comprising over 1300 individual pages of text. Of the 68 individuals that we have records of Eastham corresponding with, most were botanists, including eminent names such as Erling Porsild, David Keck, and Mary Bowerman. Interestingly we can also see that Eastham was in correspondence with individuals from many different backgrounds, including a cattle rancher, medicinal herb salesman, railway worker, and even someone asking about a potential cure for arthritis! Despite the fact that Eastham emigrated to Canada from Scotland as an adult, the records at UBC show that he corresponded exclusively with North Americans.

The vast majority of the letters were typewritten, and but some were written by hand. It could be challenging to decipher the 1940s cursive style handwriting, but being able to cross reference with resources, such as British Columbia Place Names, was at times a great help. I transcribed the handwritten letters myself, but the typewritten letters were processed automatically. Paul Bucci, the Informatics Curator at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, wrote a pipeline that used Tesseract for optical character recognition to transcribe the typewritten letters.

Linking up the letters to the physical herbarium specimens is an ongoing process, but interesting findings have already been uncovered. Most notably I’ve found correspondence about one species endemic to Vancouver Island that we now know was new to science at the time, and which I was able to link back to a herbarium specimen held at UBC. Once the project is complete, the letters will be linked to the relevant herbarium specimens with Specify, the collections management software used by the Beaty Biodiversity Museum, and then uploaded to GBIF.

Through this internship I was able to improve my technical skills in data management, data handling, and scripting. I also honed my historical research skills by spending some time in the BC Archives and Vancouver Archives to find more information about Eastham and his work. I also learned a lot about social history and World War II by reading his letters. Eastham’s correspondence collection was a fascinating dataset to work with, and completely different to any type of research I had been involved with before.

]]><![CDATA[Vascular Plant Diversity Of The Southern Gulf Islands, Saanich Peninsula, And San Juans]]>Wed, 21 Jan 2026 17:17:07 GMThttps://www.ciee-icee.ca/ldp-stories/vascular-plant-diversity-of-the-southern-gulf-islands-saanich-peninsula-and-san-juansData Rescue Interns: Cindy Gao and Robin Bradley

In the summer of 2025, we completed a data rescue Internship with the Harvey Janszen Legacy Project and the Institute for Multidisciplinary Ecological Research in the Salish Sea (IMERSS). Harvey Janszen was an amateur naturalist based in the Southern Gulf Islands, Saanich Peninsula, and San Juan Islands. He recorded extensive notes about plant species occurrences in these places for over forty years (1973-2017), providing invaluable insight into plant community changes over time in this unique region. These handwritten notes across five journals have been the subject of two other LDP internships (Part 1, Part 2).

We focused on the contents of Journal 5, labeled as “Flora of Saturna”, though this journal contained notes from six islands in the Southern Gulf Islands. We first focused on transcribing the notes from the journal, which included over 2000 observations and had severe water damage in the first 20 pages. For Robin, this included many familiar plants, as they work in the savanna ecosystems of Vancouver Island near where Harvey spent time recording plant species.

Next we turned our attention to data curation. This included checking species names with known occurrences on iNaturalist and using the Flora of the Pacific Northwest and GBIF species checker tools to update species names. Another important part of data curation involved cross checking recorded locations with maps of the region. Many of Harvey’s journal entries included descriptions of the locations, but no coordinates. To provide coordinates, we had to trawl through Google Earth to try and approximate coordinates based off Harvey’s descriptions. This process was a bit of a scavenger hunt - trying to find coordinates for locations like “abandoned pig farm” often involved reading local newspapers, checking land records, and hoping that Harvey’s colleagues could provide insights.

After data curation, we converted the occurrence dataset to standard DarwinCore format and Robin prepared the dataset for submission to Canadensys.

This internship provided valuable experience for both of us to improve our data cleaning and formatting skills as well as the opportunity to work with this incredible dataset and make it more widely available for further analysis. We thank Andrew Simon at IMERSS and the Living Data Project for this opportunity.

]]><![CDATA[Acadia Wildlife Museum inventory]]>Wed, 21 Jan 2026 17:02:18 GMThttps://www.ciee-icee.ca/ldp-stories/acadia-wildlife-museum-inventoryData Rescue Intern: Eniola Oni

In the Spring/Summer of 2025, I completed a data rescue internship for the Acadia Wildlife Museum. This internship was facilitated by CIEE's the Living Data Project. I worked on rescuing thousands of collections records from the 1920s to present day. They included rare species and items that can no longer be collected. I moved these records from an old computer and outdated software, Filemaker pro 12, cleaned them using R programming and moved them into Specify 7, an open-source biological data management platform. Some of these collections were then published on GBIF. It was a beautiful experience for me as I got to see and appreciate the work that goes into keeping records alive.

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