Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I appreciate the invitation to speak to you today. I'm coming to you from the traditional territory of the Coast Salish people in southwestern B.C.

I'm a professor of conservation biology at Simon Fraser University. I've also just recently finished four years as the chair of COSEWIC, the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada. That has given me a vantage point to see how we can use the power of citizen science for conservation assessment. I'm going to speak a little bit about that.

First, I just want to give you an idea of the scope of what we're dealing with. Increasingly, we tend to call citizen science “community science”, but it is the collection of scientific information by volunteers. As Patrick Nadeau said, it's not new. It's been going on for a long time. What is new is the availability of online platforms that can collect this data and display it back to people in a very friendly and useful way.

I'll pick up on this comment about eBird, which is an online portal where birders can submit their checklists. As of right this second, around the world, 16,826 checklists have been submitted to eBird. That's today—over 16,000 checklists. That's not even on a weekend. The power of citizen scientists to collect huge amounts of information really shouldn't be underestimated.

I particularly wanted to speak about iNaturalist, because it is really a game-changer, in my opinion, for citizen science. Unlike eBird, it collects data on all species—plants, animals and fungi. It's based on photos. You can upload a photograph of any species and get it mapped on the platform, and then iNaturalist will even use artificial intelligence to suggest what it is, if you don't know. Others can see your observation. They can chime in and help with your observation.

The New York Times recently had an article in which it called iNaturalist “The Nicest Place Online”. That's because people are very supportive and they encourage each other to learn to identify things and they celebrate their successes when they find interesting species.

In Canada, nearly 10 million observations have been submitted to iNaturalist. That means photos, audio or both. For the whole planet we have 2.5 million people registered with iNaturalist. They've submitted 126 million observations. The use of the site has tripled in the last three years. It is now the biggest citizen science platform in the world.

I want to spend a little bit of time now, for the final part of my talk, just to give you examples of what we can do with this information. You heard some examples from Patrick Nadeau and earlier from Jason Hwang.

I'll give you an example. I'm the co-leader of a program that promotes the use of iNaturalist to do biodiversity surveys in provincial parks in British Columbia. The other co-leader of this program is Dr. Brian Starzomski from the University of Victoria. We're doing this as volunteers. We've partnered with the Province of B.C. through their BC Parks agency—which is funding us—to hire teams of students. We send them out across the province camping in provincial parks and taking an average of 1,000 or 1,500 photographs every day.

These are some of the best young naturalists in western Canada. These are really the best of the best. It is the best job in the world, as you might imagine. We have been able to choose from very good naturalists. We're mentoring them. They're exploring nature. We do the occasional bioblitz as well to promote the use of citizen science for people to engage with nature.

The other example I can give you is from my past work with COSEWIC. We are the federally mandated body of volunteer scientists who assess the status of species for potential inclusion in the federal Species at Risk Act. COSEWIC's status reports are increasingly being populated with data from citizen science—especially on birds, to a very large extent. There are many others as well.

Actually, iNaturalist is very prominent in this. We refer to iNaturalist all the time to discover where species are and what their distributions are. These are key things that we can use to try to help assess their status.

I'll just conclude by saying that I think federal support could operate at the grassroots level by sponsoring bioblitzes to engage people, and also at the upper level with places like NatureServe Canada, which promote and disseminate citizen science information.

Thank you very much.

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