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Data Rescue Intern: Katie Gyte In the summer of 2025, I completed a Data Rescue Internship in collaboration with the IISD Experimental Lakes Area (IISD-ELA). The IISD-ELA is located in Northwestern Ontario and is known as the world’s freshwater laboratory, comprising a network of 58 small lakes and their watersheds made available for scientific research. The project that my internship focused on was the FLooded Uplands Dynamics EXperiment (FLUDEX), an ecological experiment conducted from 1997 to 2003 that investigated the effects of reservoir creation on greenhouse gas fluxes and methylmercury production and accumulation in the food web.  Photos from IISD-ELA archives. Credit: IISD-ELA Data Rescue Intern: Hannah Friesen Since 2020, more than 70 data rescue internships have been completed, helping to save ecological, evolutionary, and environmental datasets from disappearing. During my internship, I focused on tracking the status of these previous projects and increasing the visibility of their resulting datasets. A major part of my role was outreach, following up with past data partners to help finalize datasets and collecting spotlight stories from interns for the LDP website (like this one!)  Figure: Web map of rescued data projects. Data Rescue Intern: Mohammadjavad Meghrazi
In fall 2021, I participated in the Living Data Project Data Rescue internship, working on a dataset on conifer forest recovery after prescribed fire, collected by Dr. Phil Burton, a professor emeritus at the University of Northern British Columbia. The dataset contains the state of forest vegetation, seedling regeneration, and environmental conditions for up to 6 years after fire, across three locations in British Columbia and Alberta provinces. This dataset can help in understanding the determinants of forest recovery after fire. As an intern, I was in charge of cleaning the data and putting different pieces of it together into a format that is readily usable. This was a valuable experience and helped me improve my skills in data handling in R. Data Rescue Intern: Kennedy Zwarych In the Winter of 2024, I was privileged to complete a data rescue internship for the Ontario Forest Birds at Risk (OFBAR) program within Birds Canada. From approximately 1971 to 2017, OFBAR was collecting data on rare and at-risk birds without a standardized survey protocol. This data was a combination of incidental observations, property walk-throughs, and irregularly timed point counts. My first task was to collect, clean and combine all information into a usable format that then could be uploaded to a data portal called NatureCounts. NatureCounts allows visitors to interact with one of the largest datasets of birds worldwide. It hosts data from bird banding, bird monitoring and also citizen based bird surveillance programs. Luckily for me, there are clearly outlined formats that data must fit into before being uploaded to NatureCounts.  Photo from Birds Canada website Data Rescue Intern: David Zilkey In January 2025, I had the opportunity to complete a data rescue internship with Water Rangers as part of the Living Data Project. Water Rangers is a non-profit organization whose goal is to empower communities to protect and steward their local waterways. They do this in several ways, including the production of educational materials and water testing kits designed for use by citizen scientists.  Figure 1: Interactive Watershed Reports map from www.watershedreports.ca. Users can click on their watershed to explore its report and zoom in to individual subwatersheds. Data Rescue intern: Mobina Gholamhosseini During Fall 2023 to Winter 2024, I had the opportunity to take part in a data rescue internship through the Canadian Institute of Ecology and Evolution’s Living Data Project (LDP), supported by an NSERC CREATE. As a graduate student at the Université de Montréal, I was thrilled to contribute to the accessibility of valuable ecological data. The focus of the internship was on a valuable dataset originally collected in 1967–68 from 63 lodgepole pine-dominated forest stands in Banff and Jasper National Parks (Alberta, Canada). These data — on soils, trees, and understory vegetation — represent an important snapshot of forest conditions from over 50 years ago, collected during the MSc thesis work of Roger Hnatiuk.
Data Rescue Intern: Yiduo “Harry” Zhang The 1957-1958 New Brunswick topographic map series carries valuable data of historical land cover, land use, and landscape feature locations throughout the province that are only available on paper. Many of these paper maps currently in possession of the Canadian Forest Service also contain handwritten annotations about historical field sample sites cumulated through decades of work done by various researchers from the agency. With its provincial scope and a resolution of 1:50,000 scale, this historical dataset could prove invaluable for studies of species distribution and habitat change. However, in order to effectively utilize, store, and distribute this spatial dataset, it first needs to be digitized.
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