St. Denis National Wildlife - hackathon

Data Rescue Intern: Faraz Khan

My LDP internship was focused on rescuing bird survey data collected by Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) from the 1980s to the 1990s in the St. Denis National Wildlife Area, in Saskatchewan. The St Denis National Wildlife area is in a region known as the Prairie Pothole Region, a system of wetlands which spans the north central portion of the North American Great Plains. This complex of wetlands is ecologically important, and acts as a harbour for many species of plants and animals. St. Denis has been under study since the 1960s, where researchers collected various metrics such as water quality, toxicology, wildlife counts, hydrological data, and meteorological information. Though St Denis has been under continued study for approximately 60 years, there has been little progress made in collating a cohesive dataset. A large amount of data involving the same metrics have been collected by different researchers across different time frames. As such, it is a worthwhile effort to collect these disparate datasets from St. Denis to form a continuous set of data.

Over six weeks, from September to October 2024, I coordinated the planning of a hackathon. Our main goals for this event were to firstly recover data that has not been digitized, and secondly to introduce undergraduate students to ecological data management and the research that occurs in the St Denis National Wildlife Area. Recruitment of students occurred from late September to Early October, where we had an overwhelming amount of interest from students with 40 registering, though we were only able to accommodate 10. We held a four-day event at the Canadian Institute of Ecology and Evolution in the University of Regina, with a day field trip to St Denis, located three hours north. During the field trip, we attended a seminar from an  ECCC technician, followed by a hike through the area guided by students whose research focused on water chemistry and ecology.

​For the rest of our week, Erik Dean- the LDP post-doctoral fellow, and I led a series of presentations on how to best digitize data and best practices related to data entry. Over the course of the hackathon and the weeks succeeding it, we were able to categorize and successfully digitize the bird data from ECCC, while also creating a framework for the management of the bird data. This work will continue with a second data rescue internship to finish the data archival process.