I'll use invasive forest pests as an example, since that's why we're here. We have an insect diagnostician on staff at the ISC. If the citizen is out in the environment and find what they think is a potential sighting, we encourage them to report that through the EDDMapS tool. If not, it can come directly to us.
That would go in. It would come to our diagnostician with either a photo or an actual sample. If he's able to diagnose it from that, we then inform the regulatory people who would need to be involved. That might be the provincial forest health team, it might be CFIA or it might be CFS. It depends on what the species is.
From there, we would be involved in helping CFIA respond, or in this case, we helped CFIA respond with their survey. We would engage the municipality along the way as well. That's the process we take for forest pests.
Our partner, the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters, actually has people on staff who do verifications of all the reports that come in through their online tool. If it's a report of an Asian carp, it goes to DFO. They have different folks who identify those.
We all have a process delineated so that it goes to the right authorities to be able to respond. It's very quick.
The final step is that once the regulatory authorities are ready to get the information out to the public, we're able to do so very quickly. We have pest alert functions on our forest invasives website where we can send that information, that bulletin, very quickly so that all the networks are on the lookout for that species.