Rick Howie BC Interior Swan and Eagle Count

Data Rescue Intern: Megan Duchesne

In November 2024, I had the privilege of working as a Data Rescue Intern with the Kamloops Naturalist Club. This project involved preserving five decades' worth of count data for species of swans and eagles throughout interior British Columbia. 

Rick Howie (1946-2023) was a dedicated naturalist and birdwatcher who initiated the Interior British Columbia Swan and Eagle Count, which is conducted by volunteers each year. This data has become particularly valuable over time, offering opportunities to test predictions related to population trends and dynamics. For example, the surprising increase in the number of trumpeter swans in the region was tracked with the parallel decline in tundra swans. Moreover, eagles were counted in surveys following suggestions that coastal populations had been in decline and that their abundance fluctuated with the size of fish runs.

During my internship, I created a reproducible workflow in R while transforming original datasets into analyzable formats for future use. I also located transects' start and end coordinates across regions and created a relational database for survey count and coordinate data. Finally, I deposited the cleaned and reformatted datasets to Nature Counts, an open data platform, making the data easily accessible to the public. I coordinated with Nature Counts to facilitate data entry directly through the app for future surveys. I am so grateful for the work done by my undergraduate assistant, Joy Lee, who helped to recover missing data from survey reports.
This internship provided me with invaluable lessons and opportunities. I appreciate that I was able to gain hands-on experience in data management and the development of reproducible workflows. I also had the chance to collaborate with data owners, survey coordinators, and Nature Counts representatives, expanding my professional network and knowledge of best practices in ecological data stewardship.