Data Rescue Intern: Claire Voss
In the summer of 2024, I participated in the Living Data Project as a data rescue intern for the University of Toronto Vegetation Survey. The goal of this 6-week internship was to digitize and encode historical forest data from the second half of the 20th century, provided from the vegetation surveys of the lab of the late professor Paul Maycock. Currently housed on paper, the data required encoding to allow for their future use by the scientific community. To accomplish this, I created a relational database in Microsoft Access focusing on representing the whole of the data collected, streamlined data entry, and data quality assurance and control. Additionally, working with Peter Rodriguez, a PhD student in the Fortin Lab at the University of Toronto, we created an app in RShiny to visualize site distribution, displaying site name, coordinates, and date surveyed.

Intern: Jessica Ollinik

In the summer of 2024, I participated in a Data Rescue Internship where I archived historical ice data from Ontario lakes. Dr. Sapna Sharma of York University has a collection of long-term Ontario lake ice phenology records (freeze and thaw dates) acquired from several stewards across the province, with some Ontario ice records dating back to the mid-1800s. My internship was focused on cleaning and formatting this data for upload to DataStream. DataStream is an open-access platform where water quality data is formatted in a very consistent schema, and the data is easily accessible to the public. The data uploaded during my internship marks the first time that ice data has been included in DataStream, as their schema was only recently updated to include ice phenology parameters. This will encourage increased usage of Canadian lake ice data in global climate change analyses, and I am thankful to have been a part of this unique contribution to ice phenological research. 

Data rescue interns: Parker Lund and Alexandra McCallum

For our Data Rescue Internship, we had the opportunity to pick up where 2023 intern, Lauren Gill, left off in terms of processing the data for Bill Merilees’ micromollusc collection. Please check out the post by previous intern Laura Gill to learn more about Bill Merilees and his large and diverse mollusc collection donation.

We worked closely with Sheila Byers and Dr. Christopher Harley, who curate the marine invertebrate collection at the Beaty Biodiversity Museum located at the University of British Columbia. The Merilees Collection primarily includes micromolluscs, some macromolluscs, and  several subcollections. Undergraduate intern Wendy Frankel tackled the Kit Malkin’s subcollection transcribing handwritten field notebooks, crosschecking field numbers with the actual specimens and organizing the specimens within the collection by family and genus.

We split the remainder of the electronic records spanning from the 1960s up through the early 2000s. Since the format differed pretty drastically from the 2010s data that Lauren worked on, we came up with an alternative, flexible method of data scraping using the R package Officer for transferring each line of a Word document into a dataframe. Ultimately we wanted to get the data as cleaned up, and organized as possible, so that it is ready for entry into the museum’s Specify7 database and made publicly available through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility.

Data rescue interns: Ben Mumford and Lindsay Trottier 

Harvey Janszen (1946-2021) was a beloved amateur botanist and naturalist who extensively documented his findings around the Southern Gulf Islands and Saanich Peninsula in Southern BC as well as the San Juan Islands in Washington. His work filled 5 field journals, spanning from 1973-2017. Although some of these data are already available on the open-access portal GBIF, the observation-only occurrence data, has yet to be extracted. Digitizing these records would generate thousands of new vascular plant species occurrences for the south coastal BC region, in a period before iNaturalist. 

Andrew Simon from the Institute for Multidisciplinary Ecological Research in the Salish Sea (IMERSS) was a close friend and mentee of Harvey’s. He intends to curate and preserve the valuable data that Harvey collected over his lifetime. This includes overseeing 1) the data rescue of his field notes, 2) the review of Harvey’s specimen data in herbarium databases, and 3) overseeing a committee of curating botanists working to complete Harvey’s last work of publishing an annotated checklist of vascular plant species for the Southern Gulf Islands and Saanich Peninsula. Therefore, this project has many moving parts, including two rounds of LDP internships (see the summary of the first internship by Emma Menchions linked here) plus a Hack-a-thon event held at the University of British Columbia, where undergraduate students worked to digitize a large portion of Harvey Janszen’s field notes. to edit.