Spruce budworm outbreak and the Green River archives

Data rescue intern: Sandra Cuadros

In 2024, I had the opportunity to participate in a LDP Data rescue internship.. The original goal of the internship was for me to stay in New Brunswick for six weeks during the summer and get familiarized with historical archived data of the budworm project – a project that aims to monitor budworm populations in the east (mainly New Brunswick and Quebec), and therefore detect outbreaks to address them before they expand. This ongoing project has been collecting data for several decades. The project is impressive for several reasons, one of them being the temporal scale of it, and this is a clear example that long-term monitoring of populations is essential for conservation efforts.

And while the dataset is extensive and quite comprehensive, slight adjustments in the methodology or changes in terminology throughout the years make retrieving the data quite challenging. Hence, part of my tasks was to decode some of the information in historic reports and propose formats to store data in the most efficient and visual way for it to be digitized. In this process, I learned not only how to act as a detective to decode information, but also to be resilient. After some unexpected logistical issues that arose while getting ready for the internship, the original goals had to change, and so did our plan. The internship was therefore oriented to organize, visualize and help analyze more recent data. Throughout this I was exposed to coding for data wrangling, which I had little experience with, and which are valuable skills in my career. I am very grateful for this opportunity, and I would like to thank the Living Data Project, as well as all the mentors who guided me in this process.