Bottlenecks to Survival

Data Rescue Intern: Ziqian Han

In the winter of 2025, I worked as an internship student with the Living Data Project where I archived salmon datasets for the Bottlenecks to Survival project under the Pacific Salmon Foundation. The datasets contain information on Passive Integrated Transponder (PIT) tagged salmons and detections of the tagged fishes at the Cowichan watershed in British Columbia, Canada. They are used to develop the evaluation framework and infrastructure to determine survival bottlenecks and strategies to maximize stocks for wild and hatchery Chinook, Coho and Steelhead for conservation of sustainability.

My goal during the internship is to develop reproducible tools for data archiving and submission to multiple online repositories such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS), and the Ocean Tracking Network (OTN). To achieve this, I first learnt their requirements on data and metadata. For OBIS and GBIF, I transformed the data into Darwin Core-Archive (DwC-A) format by creating a core data sheet about every PIT-tagged fish and multiple extension files on their relevant information such as the fork length. As there are similar datasets for other watersheds in the database, I also wrote an R script to automate data standardization to DwC-A. Next, I transformed the datasets using the templates provided by OTN for submission to OTN.

For the metadata, I used an online tool to develop the metadata in EML standards. I also used the same metadata information to fill out OTN’s metadata template. As an effort to automate metadata creation in EML standards, I learnt and experimented with the development of a pygeometa EML extension that reads in a YAML file containing the metadata information and outputs an XML file of the metadata in EML standards. By the end of my internship, I partly finished it and I am willing to carry it on for my interests and career development.
 
During the six weeks, I learnt a great deal and gained experience with data archiving, metadata standards, and working in a collaborative environment. I also successfully adapted to different communication styles in a new field and expanded my professional network in ecology.