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.