Water health and data rescue for Canada's Watershed Reports

Data Rescue Intern: David Zilkey

​In January 2025, I had the opportunity to complete a data rescue internship with Water Rangers as part of the Living Data Project. Water Rangers is a non-profit organization whose goal is to empower communities to protect and steward their local waterways. They do this in several ways, including the production of educational materials and water testing kits designed for use by citizen scientists.

Figure 1: Interactive Watershed Reports map from www.watershedreports.ca. Users can click on their watershed to explore its report and zoom in to individual subwatersheds.

My work at Water Rangers was part of the Watershed Reports, a data synthesis effort bringing together millions of data points from Canadian rivers and streams. These data included measurements of water quality, flow, benthic macroinvertebrate and fish communities, sourced from organizations across Canada. Because data were sourced from diverse organizations, each with their own storage methods, there was significant effort needed to process and clean data for standardized analyses. My work at Water Rangers focused on developing reproducible R scripts to manipulate data to match the standardized format used by DataStream. These scripts also conducted necessary data transformations and identified and flagged potential outliers. The data I worked with were integrated into the Watershed Reports and published in Spring 2025. Go check them out and see how healthy your watershed is! ​