Vascular Plant Diversity Of The Southern Gulf Islands, Saanich Peninsula, And San Juans

Data Rescue Interns: Cindy Gao and Robin Bradley
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In the summer of 2025, we completed a data rescue Internship with the Harvey Janszen Legacy Project and the Institute for Multidisciplinary Ecological Research in the Salish Sea (IMERSS). Harvey Janszen was an amateur naturalist based in the Southern Gulf Islands, Saanich Peninsula, and San Juan Islands. He recorded extensive notes about plant species occurrences in these places for over forty years (1973-2017), providing invaluable insight into plant community changes over time in this unique region. These handwritten notes across five journals have been the subject of two other LDP internships (Part 1, Part 2). 

We focused on the contents of Journal 5, labeled as “Flora of Saturna”, though this journal contained notes from six islands in the Southern Gulf Islands. We first focused on transcribing the notes from the journal, which included over 2000 observations and had severe water damage in the first 20 pages. For Robin, this included many familiar plants, as they work in the savanna ecosystems of Vancouver Island near where Harvey spent time recording plant species. 

Next we turned our attention to data curation. This included checking species names with known occurrences on iNaturalist and using the Flora of the Pacific Northwest and GBIF species checker tools to update species names. Another important part of data curation involved cross checking recorded locations with maps of the region. Many of Harvey’s journal entries included descriptions of the locations, but no coordinates. To provide coordinates, we had to trawl through Google Earth to try and approximate coordinates based off Harvey’s descriptions. This process was a bit of a scavenger hunt - trying to find coordinates for locations like “abandoned pig farm” often involved reading local newspapers, checking land records, and hoping that Harvey’s colleagues could provide insights.

After data curation, we converted the occurrence dataset to standard DarwinCore format and Robin prepared the dataset for submission to Canadensys. 

This internship provided valuable experience for both of us to improve our data cleaning and formatting skills as well as the opportunity to work with this incredible dataset and make it more widely available for further analysis. We thank Andrew Simon at IMERSS and the Living Data Project for this opportunity.