Rangeland Health Assessments of NCC Properties in Saskatchewan

The data rescue intern: 
Michael Mensah

Since its establishment in 1962, the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) and its supporters have been committed to protecting over 14 million hectares (more than 35 million acres) of ecologically significant lands across Canada.
This internship involved working with baseline documentation reports which capture species inventories and impact assessment data collected on over 50,000 acres of land managed by NCC in southern Saskatchewan since 2004.

This project forms part of a collaborative, science-based approach that the NCC employs to understand how ecosystems function across the country so as to aid in the making of informed management decisions. This project involved working with geospatial information, lists of plant species and their relative abundances, including species at risk, and assessments of soil stability, water quality, invasive species, and plant growth. Activities completed for this internship included the extraction and conversion of data from non-Standard (PDFs) to standard (.CSV) formats, quality control, metadata generation, and creation of a data management plan for future archiving of assessment data. Species data collated will be submitted to Saskatchewan Conservation Data Centre for archiving.
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Of the 78 baseline documentation reports that contained relevant information for the completion of this project, 46 could be extracted during the timeline of this internship. Detailed ReadMe files were also created to allow for the replication of the methods employed in the future so that the project can be completed. In total, three data files consisting of summary information, assessment indices and dominant species were collated.