Historical pesticide application in Atlantic Canada’s forests.

The Data Rescue Intern: YueYu 

The Canadian forest has been heavily sprayed with harmful pesticides in the past, and the negative effects of these applied pesticides continue to persist until today. My internship project partnered with Dr. Christopher Edge and Shane Heartz (Natural Resources Canada), and we aimed to systematically digitize and summarize historical spray information in New Brunswick, Canada. An existing geodatabase was digitized in the early 2000s, containing spray block shapefiles and spray information for New Brunswick from the year 1952 to 1993.

My work mainly focused on validating the precision of the shapefiles and metadata in this existing geodatabase. Additionally, I visualized information from the geodatabase into a summary timeline graph for different spray combinations over the years. During the validation process, the lack of sufficient references was a major challenge. Many reports and supporting documents for the historical spray data were buried in the Forestry Centre basement of Fredericton, New Brunswick. Thus, the internship ended with a partly validated geodatabase, but documentation and metadata for further validation were clearly outlined in a final report. These files could be a helpful guide for the next intern to continue on this project and explore more analysis possibilities with the validated geodatabase.