Species at Risk Inventories on NCC Properties in Ontario

The data rescue intern: Jessica Kennedy

The Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) is Canada’s leading non-for-profit land conservation organization. NCC Ontario staff regularly surveys and inventories species across its properties, many of which are species at risk and invasive species. Over the past decade, NCC Ontario has amassed a very large database of species sightings (including key details such as behavior, abundance, habitat, observer, date and location). To make this data widely accessible, species at risk data will be submitted to Ontario's Natural Heritage Information Centre, and the invasive species data can be submitted to a repository such as EDDMaps/iNaturalist. However, many aspects of this dataset needed to be “cleaned up” and validated before submission to these repositories. This is what I worked on with Claire and Gracielle to accomplish throughout the course of this internship. This dataset would be very useful for other researchers and conservation organizations interested in Ontario’s many ecologically significant species at risk and invasive species.