Eelgrass Transplant Monitoring Data in the Salish Sea (SeaChange Marine Conservation Society)

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.

​For over 25 years, SeaChange has been conducting monitoring surveys and restoration efforts for seagrass beds at multiple sites along Vancouver Island and the Salish Sea. Over many years, they had accumulated a wealth of data that needed to be archived in a manner that allowed for versioning, as data collection is ongoing and will need to be updated over time. SeaChange collected monitoring data during dives along a transect to assess the health and density of seagrass beds. Environmental data was also collected via the installation of HOBO loggers at sites. At the start of the project, the data had been partially digitized in multiple different file formats, or was in a paper format across different boxes.
 
With help from undergraduate student Gloria Rahgozar (who digitized & entered over 5,000 paper entries!), I consolidated, cleaned, and combined all seagrass and subtidal monitoring datasheets into a final, usable format. I developed scripts to batch-clean the environmental data collected on multiple installed HOBO loggers and added numerical location keys to be able to tie this data to their seagrass monitoring efforts. I then developed a workflow and documentation to facilitate any future updates to the dataset, so that it can be versioned as needed. This first version of the dataset encapsulates years of seagrass metrics & environmental conditions collected from 40 sites between August 2015 and December 2023. As an openly available dataset on Zenodo, this SeaChange data can help restoration practitioners and researchers to study possible drivers of seagrass meadow decline or recovery after transplantation. 
 
This internship was such a rewarding experience! It greatly helped me improve my data handling and management skills, and it was deeply inspirational to see the dedication and wealth of data that SeaChange had accumulated through community-led efforts for these coastal nearshore ecosystems. 

Image credit: SeaChange Marine Conservation Society