Canadian Open Data Society 2025 winners: Diane Srivastava founded and leads the Living Data Project as Director of the Canadian Institute of Ecology and Evolution and Professor at the University of British Columbia.
She founded the Living Data Project (LDP) in 2019 to meet two challenges for Canadian open data:
Understanding how Canada’s biodiversity is changing, requires long-term ecological data.
The widespread lack of training in reproducible data management.
The LDP solves both problems:
It trains graduate students on best practices in research data management and reproducible research, then, pairs them with researchers or organizations with critical legacy datasets in need of data-rescue.
To create the LDP, she brought together a dozen university faculty across Canada to provide lectures, mentor data rescue internships, and organize working groups.
She successfully applied for a $1.65 million NSERC-CREATE grant which supports three postdoctoral scholars and a program coordinator who help run the program.