Fifty years of student reports offer a unique and complicated perspective on Barkley Sound's marine environment

Researchers at the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre have observed Barkley Sound for more than fifty years, accumulating a perspective on the region's natural systems that few institutions can match. Beyond its formal research, students in independent projects and class assignments have produced tens of thousands of reports documenting species occurrences, site conditions, methods, and measurements, often at the same locations year after year. This record constitutes a large, haphazard observational history of Barkley Sound. It sits in paper and scattered digital files, in inconsistent terminology and without standard metadata, and is effectively inaccessible for analysis.The Current is an AI-augmented document processing and knowledge mobilization platform being built by Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Using OCR of paper and mixed-format sources and human-in-the-loop review of extracted records, The Current is being used operationally to help DFO transform its manual data extraction processes and corporate knowledge into machine-accessible data and concepts. Future iterations will use ontology-based harmonization of terminology to train sovereign-AI models that are anchored on DFO knowledge and priorities.A Proof-of-concept application of The Current to BMSC’s student reports, and a collaboration between BMSC, the Center for Integrative Ecology and Evolution and DFO will explore how data and knowledge extraction from these reports can be leveraged to support analyses not previously feasible: longitudinal trends in species occurrence at fixed sites, shifts in student methods over time, and recovery of findings otherwise buried in the archive. I will present the architecture and the planned application to the BMSC archive.