Harvey Janszen Legacy Project - Part 2

Data rescue interns: Ben Mumford and Lindsay Trottier 

Harvey Janszen (1946-2021) was a beloved amateur botanist and naturalist who extensively documented his findings around the Southern Gulf Islands and Saanich Peninsula in Southern BC as well as the San Juan Islands in Washington. His work filled 5 field journals, spanning from 1973-2017. Although some of these data are already available on the open-access portal GBIF, the observation-only occurrence data, has yet to be extracted. Digitizing these records would generate thousands of new vascular plant species occurrences for the south coastal BC region, in a period before iNaturalist. 

Andrew Simon from the Institute for Multidisciplinary Ecological Research in the Salish Sea (IMERSS) was a close friend and mentee of Harvey’s. He intends to curate and preserve the valuable data that Harvey collected over his lifetime. This includes overseeing 1) the data rescue of his field notes, 2) the review of Harvey’s specimen data in herbarium databases, and 3) overseeing a committee of curating botanists working to complete Harvey’s last work of publishing an annotated checklist of vascular plant species for the Southern Gulf Islands and Saanich Peninsula. Therefore, this project has many moving parts, including two rounds of LDP internships (see the summary of the first internship by Emma Menchions linked here) plus a Hack-a-thon event held at the University of British Columbia, where undergraduate students worked to digitize a large portion of Harvey Janszen’s field notes. to edit.

Ben: 
After becoming acquainted with the scripts and photo scans of Journals 7 and 8, I turned my attention away from the occurrence, and towards collection data – samples taken during Harvey's excursions, noted and deposited at the Royal BC Museum, Victoria. A considerable amount of time was spent trawling the original field notes, cross-referencing sample number ID’s and the locations of where samples were collected. Similarly to occurrence observations, the excel spreadsheets, initially compiled through undergraduate hackathons, were cleaned and standardised using R scripts provided by Emma Menchions. These were in turn converted into Darwin Core format, and, once further information is made available from the Royal BC Museum, will also be converted to the internal collections formatting systems used. The digitisation of these field notes will make a portion of Harveys work openly available and should contribute towards a Flora of Texada Island to be produced. 
 
Lindsay: 
The primary goal of my internship was to compile all the records of species occurrences observed by Harvey Janszen in his 8th journal of field notes, which span from 1996-2000. Using the data processing protocol developed by Emma, I carried out data QA/QC on nearly 950 records of species occurrences contained in Harvey’s 8th journal. This process included ensuring species names were up-to-date according to the Flora of the Pacific Northwest, ensuring all species occurrences were properly geolocated, and converting the final dataset into Darwin-core format, a standard for documenting biodiversity.  
Then, I turned my attention to digitizing a preliminary checklist of the plant species of Texada Island (Toward a Flora of Texada Island), produced by Terry Ludwar and John Dove in 2018. I also compiled and compared species occurrence data from the Consortium of Pacific Northwest Herbaria (pnwherbaria.org) and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF; gbif.org). Pulling together all these different sources of data is an important first step toward finding all the pieces of the puzzle that make up the flora of Texada Island.  
 
This internship provided a very rewarding experience to both of us. Not only did it provide the opportunity to explore and learn about the vast diversity of plants on Texada Island, but also refined our skills in data cleaning and formatting. The importance of reproducibility in data QA/QC and how valuable field notebooks are as source of data also became apparent throughout the internship. We would both like to extend our thanks to Andrew and the Living Data Project for organizing this important project, and for providing the opportunity to help continue Harvey Janszen’s legacy.