Project and Data Design

Poweshiek skipperling is a critically endangered butterfly found in only one habitat in the United States: prairie fens. The management of prairie fens and conservation of Poweshiek and other endangered prairie fen species is dependent on ecological monitoring supported by thoughtful project design and data integration. I help lead a collaborative data-driven management project to aid conservation of Poweshiek and their habitat. I co-designed and now manage a database of over 160,000 interlinked records (and counting) of Poweshiek, plants, management actions, and environmental characteristics. Part of this work has been published in an open-access paper on the Digital Extended Specimen network (Hardisty et al. 2022).

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