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Data rescue intern: Sandra Cuadros
In 2024, I had the opportunity to participate in a LDP Data rescue internship.. The original goal of the internship was for me to stay in New Brunswick for six weeks during the summer and get familiarized with historical archived data of the budworm project – a project that aims to monitor budworm populations in the east (mainly New Brunswick and Quebec), and therefore detect outbreaks to address them before they expand. This ongoing project has been collecting data for several decades. The project is impressive for several reasons, one of them being the temporal scale of it, and this is a clear example that long-term monitoring of populations is essential for conservation efforts. 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. Data rescue intern: Jawad Sakarchi
For six weeks in the summer of 2023, I had the opportunity to participate in the LDP Data Rescue Internship. The goals set out for my internship were centered around a very large database of Range Reference Area data collected and monitored by rangeland ecologists of the Ministry of Forests in British Columbia. The data focuses on differences inside, outside and between fenced exclosures. These exclosures act as tools to explore the effects of disturbances on ecological communities, in the form of grazing (e.g., livestock or wildlife). The dataset is large, with up to 70 variables, including other disturbances, such as fire, and many biogeographic variables, such as moisture, nutrient, or ecosystem classifications. The benefit of this dataset is that it both provides an exceptionally extensive account of disturbances across 370 sites throughout BC, as well as observations (data, photographs, notes) in the same site separated by decades, or in most extreme cases even 100 years. Data rescue intern: Mannfred Masahiro Asada Boehm Sharpsand Creek is located approximately 60 km north of Thessalon, Ontario. Within this area of Crown Land, extensive wildfire research was undertaken by Brian Stocks and Doug McRae (Canadian Forest Service) from the 1970’s to early 1990’s. The oldest data in the Sharpsand Creek data set is 50 years old, with the most significant data coming from prescribed wildfire-research burns. Data collected includes pre-burn forest inventories, fire behaviour data, and post fire site analysis on regeneration, soils, and vegetation. These experimental burns generated a wealth of data, some of which have resulted in influential papers in the wildland fire literature. Other data have, until recently, remained undigitized and not available to the public. The types of large-scale experimental burns at Sharpsand Creek are very unlikely to occur today because of the risk involved.  |
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