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Data 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) Data 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). Data 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 I moved these records from an old computer and outdated software, Filemaker pro 12, cleaned them using R programming and moved them into Specify 7, an open-source biological data management platform.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. Data Rescue Intern: Katie Gyte In the summer of 2025, I completed a Data Rescue Internship in collaboration with the IISD Experimental Lakes Area (IISD-ELA). The IISD-ELA is located in Northwestern Ontario and is known as the world’s freshwater laboratory, comprising a network of 58 small lakes and their watersheds made available for scientific research. The project that my internship focused on was the FLooded Uplands Dynamics EXperiment (FLUDEX), an ecological experiment conducted from 1997 to 2003 that investigated the effects of reservoir creation on greenhouse gas fluxes and methylmercury production and accumulation in the food web.  Photos from IISD-ELA archives. Credit: IISD-ELA Data Rescue Intern: Hannah Friesen Since 2020, more than 70 data rescue internships have been completed, helping to save ecological, evolutionary, and environmental datasets from disappearing. During my internship, I focused on tracking the status of these previous projects and increasing the visibility of their resulting datasets. A major part of my role was outreach, following up with past data partners to help finalize datasets and collecting spotlight stories from interns for the LDP website (like this one!)  Figure: Web map of rescued data projects. Data Rescue Intern: Mohammadjavad Meghrazi
In fall 2021, I participated in the Living Data Project Data Rescue internship, working on a dataset on conifer forest recovery after prescribed fire, collected by Dr. Phil Burton, a professor emeritus at the University of Northern British Columbia. The dataset contains the state of forest vegetation, seedling regeneration, and environmental conditions for up to 6 years after fire, across three locations in British Columbia and Alberta provinces. This dataset can help in understanding the determinants of forest recovery after fire. As an intern, I was in charge of cleaning the data and putting different pieces of it together into a format that is readily usable. This was a valuable experience and helped me improve my skills in data handling in R. Data Rescue Intern: Kennedy Zwarych In the Winter of 2024, I was privileged to complete a data rescue internship for the Ontario Forest Birds at Risk (OFBAR) program within Birds Canada. From approximately 1971 to 2017, OFBAR was collecting data on rare and at-risk birds without a standardized survey protocol. This data was a combination of incidental observations, property walk-throughs, and irregularly timed point counts. My first task was to collect, clean and combine all information into a usable format that then could be uploaded to a data portal called NatureCounts. NatureCounts allows visitors to interact with one of the largest datasets of birds worldwide. It hosts data from bird banding, bird monitoring and also citizen based bird surveillance programs. Luckily for me, there are clearly outlined formats that data must fit into before being uploaded to NatureCounts.  Photo from Birds Canada website |
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