IISD Experimental Lakes Area (IISD-ELA)

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

The purpose of this internship was to collate the numerous data tables generated over the course of this experiment into a well-organised data package on the public repository Environmental Data Initiative (EDI). With help from IISD-ELA’s Scientific Data Manager Chris Hay and Senior Research Scientist Michael Paterson, I was able to organise and write metadata for much of the data, which has been published as version 1 of the data package.
 
My work involved standardising FLUDEX data tables by making column and sampling site names consistent across studies. I also wrote an informative document to accompany this dataset, which includes definitions of all variables across data tables, site descriptions along with maps when possible, and a summary of the methods and key results associated with the data tables included in the data package.
 
Through this internship I have refined my technical skills in data management practices and learned the importance of thorough record-keeping for metadata creation. I also feel fortunate to have been partnered with the IISD-ELA for this internship, which has opened my eyes to an impressive Canadian research operation and allowed me to play a role in preserving such an interesting set of data. This experience has shown me how important it is to actively preserve historical ecological data, as it has many more uses yet.
 
The link to the data package (version 1): 
https://portal.edirepository.org/nis/mapbrowse?scope=edi&identifier=2120&revision=1

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Photos from IISD-ELA archives. Credit: IISD-ELA.