Data 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. 

Data 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

Data 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.

Data 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.