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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.  Thick-billed murres with chicks and egg: illustration by Laura Lardinois ©2026 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. Eelgrass Transplant Monitoring Data in the Salish Sea (SeaChange Marine Conservation Society)3/17/2026
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.  Eelgrass shoots, freshly collected and in the midst of being sorted & prepped for transplantation. Image taken during a SeaChange transplant in September 2025, when I was invited to participate in a transplant at Cadboro Bay, Victoria, BC. 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. |
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