Inventory of Aquatic Biodiversity Data across Canada

Data Rescue intern: Abigail Brown


During my data rescue internship in the fall of 2024, I worked with the Centre for Community Mapping (Co-Map) to analyze the results of a nationwide survey. This survey aimed to build an inventory of freshwater ecological datasets across Canada, and assess the vulnerability of these datasets to extinction. Co-Map is an ad-hoc committee formed by researchers across several organizations concerned with the vulnerability of freshwater environmental datasets amid shifting government priorities, conflicting roles and responsibilities for environmental monitoring among organizations, staff turnover, and retirements.

Efforts to collect and preserve freshwater ecological data across Canada are diffuse across sectors with much variability in collection protocols, data formats, and data management strategies, even within ecosystems or taxa. This complexity makes objectives such as coordinating monitoring efforts or assessing long-term changes in ecosystem health challenging. As an initial step to assess the status of freshwater ecological data in Canada, Co-Map developed a survey to collect basic information about datasets, such as storage format, public availability, organisms and habitat surveyed, and data management plans in place (if any) for these datasets.


The survey generated responses from academics, non-governmental organizations, federal and provincial researchers, and private consultants. There was a significant amount of variability in the level of detail about the data and data management provided by respondents. Because of this, I also assisted in conducting phone interviews with some survey respondents to assess the challenges they encountered in gathering information on their datasets. The results of this survey outline the challenges in developing a large-scale data inventory and management strategy for Canada’s freshwater ecological data and highlight the importance of data rescue efforts and data management resources.