BERDI - Take a tour

Welcome to a short demonstration on how to use BERDI – the Canada Energy Regulator’s new tool to search Biophysical, Socio-Economic, and Regional Data and Information from major pipeline projects, since 2003. 

The Canada Energy Regulator, or CER, works to keep energy moving safely across the country.  

We review energy development projects and share energy information, all while enforcing some of the strictest safety and environmental standards in the world. 

The CER has collected thousands of documents for our application hearing process, including Environmental and Socio-Economic Assessments, or ESAs.  

ESAs capture data about public safety, species at risk, and environmental protection, to name a few. 

Led by the Government of Canada’s Directive on Open Government, we want to make this information as easy as possible for people to access. 

BERDI is our first step toward meeting that goal. It makes it easy to search and explore data tables and figures from publicly available Environmental and Socio-Economic Assessments.  

Let’s take a tour of BERDI.  

Here in the tagline, you can see how recently the data was updated and access more information about BERDI’s dataset. 

If you already know what you want to search for, you can use the keyword search box. If you want to explore the topics that BERDI has to offer, you can click on these icons.

Imagine I am a researcher, and I am interested in information relating to animals – let’s say beavers.

I enter in my keywords here. 

If you want to make more complex keyword searches, you can find advanced search tips here, next to the search box.

I am typing in Beaver and then clicking on Search.

You can see that this results in 464 tables, 0 figures and 2 alignment sheets.
Here are the tables. 

And on the second page we see the alignment sheets.

Perhaps I want to narrow down the results by Topics. I’ll click on Wetlands and Boats and Waterways.

And then let’s say I am only interested in results from BC.

I am going to click on View More Filters and pick that option.

Another option is to narrow down by project. I can click on the filters here or on the project tab here. 

I am going to choose the Northwest Mainline project.

Now we are down to 27 tables.

I can click on each table to see the information it holds. From here, I can also click on these links to access the originals in REGDOCS, our repository of regulatory documents

If I want to save this table, I can add it to my shelf.

I can also add it to the shelf from this main section. Or I can add all the results to the shelf.

I can quickly download a CSV file of the table from here, which I can later open in a spreadsheet application such as Excel.

Let’s say I noticed something in this table that I want to report to the project team – perhaps some strange characters in the file I downloaded, or an error in the title of the table. 

I can click on report this data and explain the issue if needed. 

A designated staff member at the CER will investigate the issue. 

Now I have my results on beavers. I can click on the shelf to download the data tables. 

I can go down here and download all data tables that are on my shelf.

Each download opens in a zip folder and has a csv file of the data as well as a readme document with further information.

Another option is to share the contents of my shelf with another person. To do this, I go up here and copy the link. 

Anyone I send this link will be able to see the content of my shelf.

I can also go to the top here to download the full dataset. 

This includes all tables in BERDI and not just the items that I searched for. Currently, we do not support the downloading of figures and alignment sheets.

As you can see BERDI makes it much easier to discover and explore the data in Environmental and Socio-Economic Assessments.  

Our work on BERDI is ongoing. We are just getting started.