Science and Research Committee on Feb. 7th, 2023

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting number 28 of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Science and Research. Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format, pursuant to the House Order of June 23, 2022. Members are attending in person in the room and remotely using the Zoom application.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(3)(i) and the motion adopted by the committee on Monday, September 26, 2022, we are continuing our study on citizen scientists.

I'd like to make a few comments for the benefit of witnesses and members.

Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. For those taking part by video conference, click on the microphone icon to activate your mike, and please mute yourself when you are not speaking. For interpretation, those on Zoom have a choice, at the bottom-right of their screen, of “floor”, “English” or “French”. Those in the room can use the earpieces and select the desired channel.

I remind you that all comments should be addressed through the chair. To members in the room who wish to speak, please raise your hand. To members on Zoom, please use the “raise hand” function. The clerk and I will manage the speaking order as best we can, and we appreciate your patience and understanding in this regard.

In accordance with our routine motion, I am informing the committee that all witnesses have completed their required connection tests in advance of the meeting.

I would like to welcome our guests to committee. We will start with a five-minute opening statement from each witness.

When you have roughly 30 seconds left, as best you can.... If I catch your eye, I'll make a gesture to speed things up. We try to keep it on time, so we can get through all our witnesses and questioners.

With that, we will start with an opening statement from Mr. Wood.

You have five minutes.

[Christopher Wood, Director of eBird, Cornell Lab of Ornithology]

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.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Thank you so much for keeping it within five minutes. It's much appreciated.

Now, we're going online with Mr. LeBaron.

[Geoffrey S. LeBaron, Director, Christmas Bird Count, National Audubon Society]

Thank you very much.

I want to thank the committee again, on my behalf and that of the National Audubon Society, for inviting me to talk to you about the Christmas bird count.

The Christmas bird count was started in 1900 by a gentleman named Frank Chapman at the American Museum of Natural History. There was a growing awareness of the need for the conservation of wildlife at the time, because wildlife supplies were dwindling rapidly due to both overhunting and also the millinery trade where feathers were used in ladies' fashion.

What Frank Chapman was able to do, because he had his own magazine called Bird-Lore, was call to do a Christmas bird count rather than a Christmas bird hunt during the holiday season. In 1900, the first Christmas bird count was done. There were 27 people involved in 25 locations across the continent. Two of those counts were done in Canada, including in Toronto, and counts have been done every year throughout the continent and internationally.

After the 27 participants and 25 counts the first year, we have now grown to over 2,600 different counts across the hemisphere with major contributions from Colombia, Mexico and throughout Latin America and the Caribbean in addition to Canada. Each count is locally organized by a compiler. It's done within a 24-kilometre circle on one calendar day during the dates of December 14 to January 5 each season. All of any age, ability or experience are welcome to participate.

When I became in charge of the program in 1987, it was a 100% paper program. There was no database at that point. The end result was a 700-page printed issue that included all of the results of every Christmas bird count that had been submitted for that season. In 1998 and 2000, Audubon joined with the lab of ornithology and also got a major grant from the National Science Foundation to create what was then called BirdSource.

BirdSource has evolved into what is now, as Chris mentioned, eBird. We needed a core database to begin the structure of BirdSource, and creating the 100-year database for the Christmas bird count became the database that is now the core of the structure of eBird.

Around the same time, around the turn of the 21st century, we also joined with Birds Canada to manage the Christmas bird count in Canada. Since then, it's been very successful, and participation in Canada has grown 40% since Birds Canada joined on.

Until about the 1980s, scientists were reluctant to accept citizen science datasets as valuable for analysis. The combination of the Christmas bird count and the breeding birds survey as long-term datasets enabled ornithologists to realize that there was a lot of very important information about learning trend data about birds across the continent. That's what many scientists are doing now. There are over 300 peer-reviewed papers utilizing Christmas bird count datasets, and we get inquiries weekly from researchers to use the CBC.

One of the key things that helped the acceptance of citizen science data was that Audubon and Patuxent Wildlife Research Center developed a toolset to analyze citizen science datasets, not just ornithological datasets but citizen science datasets in general, so those techniques were adaptable to citizen science in all fields, some of which you'll hear more about today.

The combined trend data for CBC and the breeding birds survey has led to a lot of very important studies. COSEWIC in Canada and the United States government, for watch-lists on the red list, utilize both the Christmas bird count and the breeding birds survey to come up with the trend data on a continental basis.

The other thing about the Christmas bird count that's really interesting is that we have been able to track how birds respond to climate change as their ranges have been shifting over the last 75 years. Birds are excellent indicators of the quality of the environment and the health of the environment that we all share.

One of the key things that's kept the Christmas bird count relevant is that it becomes a holiday tradition for everybody involved. People travel great distances to do the Christmas bird counts. It's a major passion to see not only the birds in the areas where they're counting but also their long-time friends that they may only see during the CBC period. People get a sense of community and a sense of place, as well as a sense of the birds that are there.

Citizen science datasets and contributions of citizen scientists in all fields are a comprehensive and free resource for researchers in many fields, including studies by the federal governments of Canada and the United States.

With that, I think I will end.

Thank you very much.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Thank you again.

We're two for two for under five minutes. Let's keep the trend running.

We're going to go to Mr. Ennis now for five minutes.

[Charles Ennis, President, Royal Astronomical Society of Canada]

Thank you.

On behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to speak to you here today.

I am a retired police detective and military officer who, in the 10th year of his life, got a telescope. I now have 58 years of observing experience. I'm the national president of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, which has been around for 154 years, has 5,200 members across the continent and has 30 centres.

I am a citizen scientist. I work with the Galaxy Zoo project, which is part of the larger Zooniverse citizen science project, helping to classify galaxies identified in sky surveys.

I'm the founder and lead of the RASC's world asterisms project, which is an ethnoastronomical reconciliation project gathering the sky cultures of the people of the world. So far, we've examined 572 cultures and gathered over 11,000 asterisms. We're only 20 months old, so we're doing pretty well.

I'm a member of Astronomers Without Borders and work with ethnoastronomers and archeoastronomers around the world on projects.

Dr. Mona Nemer, when testifying the other day, mentioned that citizen scientists are not just helping hands but also great sources of ideas for projects. I want to reinforce this. If you want to solve a problem or if you want to do an investigation, you need to get as many perspectives into the conversation and the investigation as you can. You need people from different educational, cultural and social backgrounds, because it's one of those unique perspectives that's going to give you the breakthrough that will speed things up. Citizen scientists are a great source for those perspectives.

There is a bottleneck in astronomy. Only about 10% to 20% of the astrophysicists who apply for time on the big telescopes get it. There are not enough telescopes. There are times when all of those observatories are socked in. We are the people who get the data when that happens.

Most astrophysicists don't go anywhere near an eyepiece. Technicians at the big observatories get the data they need. We spend our lives at the eyepiece. We are able to get the light curves to confirm exoplanets and exomoons transiting stars and to monitor variable stars to see if they are about to go supernova. We monitor the spectroscopy when they go supernova to figure out what kinds of elements are being created. We search off the plane of the galaxy, where there's no funding, to search for comets, for near-Earth objects that may be a hazard or for supernovas.

We get light quality readings to assist my two colleagues here, who are interested in how they affect the migration of birds. We track meteorites. We hunt them down and dig them up. In the Juno mission to Jupiter, most of those images you see are now processed by amateur astrophotographers. NASA made a decision to do that. I'm pretty sure they don't regret having done that.

We bring accurate information back to our communities and train the next generation of citizen scientists.

Dr. Rémi Quirion, when he was testifying the other day, mentioned his concerns regarding misinformation on social media. Notable science educator Neil deGrasse Tyson, in a recent radio interview, was saying there has been a failure in education because we're teaching people to memorize facts instead of teaching them how to think. The problem with that is, if the source of the facts is unreliable, you get problems.

We go out into the communities and we show them how to investigate their surroundings. I am still a detective, but now I investigate the universe.

I'd be happy to answer any questions you have for us today.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Thank you, Mr. Ennis.

Now we will open up the six-minute round of questioning.

First, from the Conservatives, we'll have Mr. Lobb for six minutes.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Thanks very much, Mr. Chair.

My first question is for Mr. Wood.

I checked out your information. For the benefit of the committee, can you help us on accuracy? What has your eBird institute done to ensure that if I go out, I don't screw up a robin with a blue jay?

Can you give us a description of that?

[Christopher Wood]

That's probably a 45-minute response—

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Christopher Wood]

—but I'll try to be brief.

Data quality is the core challenge of citizen science, and there are multiple steps that we employ to try to look at this.

The first step is that there are regional filters that are set by experts within a region that basically say, for this date and this location, what is the maximum number. If you exceed that, people are going to raise their eyebrows. In that case, because most sightings are coming in through mobile, you're presented at that time with something that says, “This is an unusual observation”, and you're basically asked for photos or for sound documentation.

The next step, which we often think less about.... False positives are something that I think we immediately jump to, but the bigger challenge is that often there are things that are vocalizing that people miss. No matter what type of sensor networks you have, you're going to have error rates associated with failures to understand this, so what we're doing is basically calibrating a sensor network.

Ours is a sensor network of people. People have quite a bit of variation in their level of expertise. If you go out with Geoff LeBaron, he's going to detect and identify just about all the birds you find. If you go out with my mom, she may detect the chickadees and some of the common birds, but not the other ones.

There's a lot of work that we also do in looking at expertise and classifying how many species per unit time people find under a variety of circumstances. That then allows us to counterweight different sensors and basically build out a more standardized sensor network.

There are several other approaches that we use as well, but those are two of the high themes.

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

Okay.

Also, there are conservation decisions. Some of the data collected helps with conservation decisions and how everything works.

I'm wondering about two things.

One is conservation. Let's say, for example, on grasslands, that the decision may be to pasture cattle or some other animal on grasslands for the benefit of the bugs, the birds and everything else, or to just leave it as grass and trees, which does happen from time to time.

The other question I wanted to ask you is in relation to invasive species. Can birds help to predict invasive species such as, for example, in my area, the emerald ash borer or something like this?

[Christopher Wood]

Those are two very good questions. I'll answer the second one first.

Actually, I think that 4.7% of all of the records in eBird are actually non-native species. In Canada, that would be things like the European starling, house sparrows and pheasants.

One of the things we've done in just the last year is to classify across the entire world where things are exotic and established, and where they seem like they might be increasing and it's worth paying attention to as an early warning indicator system that non-native species may be expanding. This is something that the USDA has been particularly interested in. Also, then, it's about being able to understand it if there are unusual things, like somebody's parrot escaping. If somebody's parrot escapes in Florida, though, and there are multiple parrots that escape, all of a sudden you might have a situation that you hadn't thought could get out of control, so in the case of birds, yes.

I also know that within iNaturalist, there are a lot of efforts where people are actually photographing trees. In the case of the emerald ash borer, you're able to see the strips. Citizen science broadly is a very good way to deal with invasive species.

Could you remind me of the first part of your question?

[Ben Lobb, Conservative, Huron—Bruce, ON]

It was on conservation decisions.

[Christopher Wood]

Yes, so in conservation decisions, one of the things that's important to understand is that we're not taking raw data and making decisions from raw data. There's a very rigorous modelling process, and I'd be happy to share with your analyst a few of the papers about how this works, but basically, the challenge that we have, when we're trying to deal with animal distributions, is that the things that animals are keying into differ across time and space.

For birds, it can be particularly challenging, and even if you just look at the breeding season for one species, that is going to be very different in the Okanagan Valley than it might be here in Ontario. When they migrate, they're using different habitats as well.

The modelling approach that we need to use needs to be robust enough that you can understand the difference in spatial and temporal patterns. What we're basically doing at a high level is running a series of independent models that allow us to understand those relationships. Think of it as a 100 by 100 kilometre grid. We overlay these on top of each other, and then do those for every week of the year. That allows us to understand how those spatial patterns could change across time and space.

One of the challenges you have is.... Traditionally, if you wanted to look at habitat management, you could do an intensive study in one particular place and focus on that question. Those results would probably work 50 miles away from there, maybe 100 kilometres away from there, but with distance and time, the impact would be different.

Citizen science allows us to understand that at an increasing spatial resolution, and that's some of the real power. Some of the things we've been doing right now have focused on sagebrush. Sagebrush in the inner mountain west is really being affected by non-native cheatgrass. It's sort of a merger of both of your questions.

Under various climate scenarios, the challenge that we have is where the best places are to target action on cheatgrass removal to achieve an optimal outcome. Using more traditional science, it's hard to address that, but in this case, we're able to look at that, because we have this information that's so spatially detailed. We can point to areas and say that these are the areas where you're going to see the highest number of increases in species of birds, because of the broad dataset and the fairly sophisticated analyses.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Thank you, Mr. Wood.

Moving on to our next member of Parliament, Ms. Diab, you have six minutes.

[Lena Metlege Diab, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and welcome to all our witnesses.

Your testimony has been fabulous, particularly for some of us who are not as familiar with this study. The reason for our study is to understand the important contribution of citizen scientists. Your testimony is terrific. I actually wrote a couple of things down regarding working with local people and local economies to target action. I think those were your words, Mr. Woods. Also, I wrote “a sense of community and a sense of place”. That was the same kind of idea, as well, from Mr. LeBaron.

Mr. Ennis, as a former detective, I very much appreciate that you are a detective, using your skills to investigate the universe.

I've been fortunate to organize guided nature walks in my community with Dr. Martin Willison, who's a retired biology and environmental studies professor at Dalhousie. I've also done a couple of nature hikes—it's only been two—with board members of Blue Mountain-Birch Cove Lakes, which is one of the most important natural spaces in my riding and, frankly, in Nova Scotia.

Your questions and what we're studying today have gotten me to think about how these kinds of leisure activities and walks in nature can also be data collection exercises, whether it's birdwatching or geocaching. Can you talk to us about how you envision regular Canadians and non-academics being able to contribute to our scientific inquiry through recreation or leisure pursuits?

I guess I could probably ask everyone that, but how about I start with Mr. LeBaron to give you, Mr. Wood, a moment to breathe.

[Geoffrey S. LeBaron]

Thank you. That's a wonderful question.

One of the really amazing things about ornithology is that a tremendous amount of the total knowledge of ornithological...or what's going on with all the birds everywhere comes from citizen science or non-professionals. There are an awful lot of ornithologists out there who do wonderful work and are also really good birdwatchers, but the great majority of the data that are collected—and certainly the vast majority of the data that come in through eBird and from most of the people who participate in the Christmas bird count—are from non-professional citizen scientists.

Just being out there and noticing things and getting.... The more people go out, the more they have the ability to notice something new and different. First you need to learn the chickadees, the cardinals, the tufted titmice, the starlings and the house sparrows, but then, suddenly, you start to notice other things as well. The same is true, I'm sure, in astronomy, and it's also definitely true in terms of botany and other fields.

Just having people out there.... More and more through iNaturalist, eBird, the Christmas Bird Count and all these other citizen science programs, people are able to contribute to datasets that can actually then be utilized by researchers who want to look into what's happening in the environment. It's not only with regard to birds but basically all fields.

[Lena Metlege Diab, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Thank you very much.

Mr. Ennis, would you like to add on that for our study?

[Charles Ennis]

Certainly.

We're familiar with the sky. We know what we expect to see there, and that's one of the ways you discover things like supernovas. The youngest member of our society who discovered one, back in 2011, was 10 years old, and then her brother two years later repeated the feat. It's a matter of walking down the path and looking for something that you expect to see and then seeing something like a rock that doesn't belong there. Maybe it's a meteorite, so you go on a nature walk and you take a stick with a magnet on the end. It's getting as many eyes on the sky as you can.

One of the issues in our field is that funding covers the most likely areas where you can find stuff, but there are areas where it's less likely and that they don't want to spend money on, and that's where we spend our time. We search those areas for things. The last near-Earth asteroid that was in the news was discovered by an amateur astronomer. It's definitely the same sort of thing.

We work, as I said, in conjunction with our local naturalists to help them monitor the sky, because the misuse of artificial light at night interferes with migratory patterns and ends up causing a lot of birds to die every year, so we're very concerned about that and happy to help them.

[Lena Metlege Diab, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Thank you.

With the time remaining, I have a quick question for you, Mr. Wood.

We've heard from previous witnesses who suggest that increasing knowledge of scientific methods, being able to question the integrity of the data, helps combat misinformation, in fact. You were talking a little bit about that earlier. What are your thoughts on this, and do you have examples—and I think you were just sharing about the bird community—of how your own work with community engagement in science has helped against misinformation?

[Christopher Wood]

I think that's one of the excellent things about citizen science, and there's a continuum of types of citizen science. Overall, eBird is basically a framework that allows people to develop their own research questions. One of the things that can happen is that you can move into this space that's often called community-based science, where you pair a scientist with a community that has very specific questions. What we've seen is that this allows them to start questioning and asking things about their place. A good example of this is that there are various ejidos in Mexico that are interested in being able to certify their forests by the presence of the birds that are there. If there are certain birds there, then the forest can be certified by CONABIO, a regulatory group in Mexico.

The process of their actively understanding this and going out and seeing the bird connects the management action with the impact, and it allows them to see things that otherwise they wouldn't have seen.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Thank you, Mr. Wood.

[Lena Metlege Diab, Liberal, Halifax West, NS]

Looking at the chair....

I was going to cede the remainder of my time to Mr. Cannings because I see how elated you are. You're very happy.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

You're a minute over already, so you'll take a minute off Mr. Cannings' time.