Thank you to both witnesses for being here today.
As a matter of full disclosure, this study was my idea and I'm glad we're doing it. I think it's very important. It's good to hear some of the initial discussions. My full disclosure is that I used to work in the citizen science world before becoming an MP. At least that was part of my world, both as a professional scientist and as a citizen scientist, so this is something that's very dear to my heart.
I just wanted to bring up some things that Mr. Lobb said. There are citizens out there who are on the land every day—whether they're farmers, fishers, hunters or birders—who are experts in their own right. You can think of citizen science as ordinary citizens doing things for real scientists who just need a lot of bodies across the country. That's one aspect of it. In many cases, the people gathering this data.... I come from the bird biology world. Most of the keen birders out there know a lot more about birds than bird biologists, so it's really valuable to engage them.
I just wanted to perhaps direct a question to Dr. Nemer about the work that some of these groups do, whether they're NGOs or people participating directly in federal government programs. Can she maybe tell us something about the scope of these things?
One real value of citizen science is that it can happen over decades. We have citizen science programs that have been going on since the year 1900. They take place all across the continent. That sort of data is impossible to gather from just a single lab.
Dr. Nemer, maybe you can expand on some of the programs that the federal government itself uses to gather important data for its work, whether it's in environment, weather and climate, or things that are important to Canadians, which really rely on citizen science.