Good morning. On behalf of our team at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the hundreds of partner organizations around the world—including Birds Canada and Québec Oiseaux, who manage eBird regionally—and the millions of people who participate in the project, I'd like to thank the committee for inviting me to discuss citizen science and eBird.
The world is at the cusp of a biodiversity crisis. It's a crisis that's entangled with climate change, human health and well-being, and our need for strong economies and long-term sustainability. To best address these challenges requires data—lots of data. Information needs to be precise and relevant at global, national, provincial and local scales. Our information needs will always outstrip the resources and funding we have available to hire professional scientists in data collection. Citizen science provides the best mechanism to gather these data.
Why birds? Birds are found all over the planet. Many species require specific habitats, resources and environmental conditions. They're excellent indicators of natural systems and ecosystems. People around the world love birds. This means they're eager to participate in data collection, particularly when the right incentives are there. They're also generally receptive to using these data in decision-making. There's now more information available on the distribution, abundance, status and trends of birds than any other taxonomic group.
It's the union of these two ideas, birds and citizen science, that gave rise to eBird. People know a lot about what's happening in their backyards. They know what's happening on their farms. They know what's happening in their forests. However, that information isn't always available to decision-makers. That gap between local knowledge and decision-makers leads to a lot of problems that you're all familiar with.
You can think of eBird as a solution for bridging that gap. Our challenge is to figure out how to reward the contribution of local knowledge to provide structure to these data so that they can be used to answer questions and have the most impact. Then it's to archive, freely share and power new data-driven approaches to science, conservation and education. Said another way, we meet local communities where they are and work with them to codevelop technology to drive global impact.
Now eBird has grown into one of the largest biodiversity-related science projects in the world, with more than 225 million bird sightings last year alone and more than 1.4 billion records. Last year alone, one in 40 people in Canada visited the eBird website. To date, eBird data have been downloaded nearly a quarter of a million times. They've been incorporated into more than 550 scientific peer-reviewed publications.
The power of these data is beyond anything that I think we would have imagined when we began this project. It's unprecedented and powerful.
The background material that I provided shows some examples of this. We're now able to see where birds are across the planet literally every week of the year. That allows us precision to target action that meets multiple needs.
These data products from eBird now power conservation around the world, from local land trusts to federal policy, from action plans aimed at individual species to corporate sustainable agriculture policies. These data also increase engagement in understanding birds, as eBird powers Merlin, a bird identification app that we also manage at the lab of ornithology. It has more than five million users, including over 100,000 every month last year in Canada.
It's important to emphasize that the foundation for all of this work began with federal funding, particularly in the U.S. with the National Science Foundation and NASA. Federal support has been incredibly important for the early stages development of both of these projects—eBird and Merlin—in research for how to develop new machine learning and statistical approaches to model and understand these data, and also the long-term support of our cyber-infrastructure.
Thank you very much. I look forward to answering any questions.