Science and Research Committee on Feb. 9th, 2023

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Submit a response to that question, if you would.

Now moving on the final two-and-a-half-minute spot, we have MP Cannings.

[Richard Cannings, NDP, South Okanagan—West Kootenay, BC]

Thank you.

I'd like to turn to Dr. Moran again, this time talking about big data.

You mentioned 1.2 petabytes. We hear a lot about gigabytes and terabytes, but you don't often hear about petabytes. I'm curious.

I have to say, my nephew, JJ Carr-Cannings, was an intern with Ocean Network Canada in software. He's some big data software engineer, so he was working on that.

I'm wondering about that data, where it goes, who has access to it and how it's used. I assume it's open-source data and that scientists from around the world can access it. Can you perhaps give us some examples of how that's used?

[Dr. Kathryn Moran]

We measure everything from temperature to video data of the deep sea. The data are openly available for the most part except for indigenous communities who want to protect their own data. Most of it is open data following the federal government's policy. It's used by educators, scientists, policy-makers and citizen scientists.

They can analyze the data to understand things like climate change, seismicity and tectonics or the chemistry of the ocean. Those are examples of the scientific benefits. We have been putting together materials that are important for educators in schools, packages of information that get shared and are easy to use by teachers. We have packages that are very simple to use by communities that capture their own data.

We are working hard at ensuring that the data are available and easy to use for every kind of user of ocean data. I have to say that we have been growing our user base internationally. About 50% are Canadians, but 50% are international, and that's because the particular footprint of monitoring we have is the most diverse range of marine environments of any particular location on the planet, so we can understand many aspects of the ocean just from our data archive.

What's coming up is using the data for advancing machine learning and learning more about the ocean through implementing machine learning and artificial intelligence.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Thank you so much.

We are out of time.

I will say a big thank you to our witnesses and to members for the questions posed, and we will now suspend briefly before moving on to our next panel.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

I call this meeting back to order.

I would like to make a few comments before we start the second half.

For people who are taking part online, just remember that for interpretation you have the choice at the bottom of your Zoom screen of either the floor, English or French. For those in the room, can you please use your earpieces and select the desired channel.

I will remind you that all comments should be addressed through the chair.

Now I would like to start with our presenters for five-minute rounds.

I will ask that you do your best to keep within five minutes. If you're nearing the end of the five minutes, I will let you know to wrap up.

To start off for the first five minutes, we have Mr. Nadeau.

[Patrick Nadeau, President and Chief Executive Officer, Birds Canada]

Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.

Good afternoon, members of the committee.

Thank you very much for inviting us to this meeting. We were very pleased to accept.

My name is Patrick Nadeau. I am the president and chief executive officer of Birds Canada. With me today is Jody Allair, our director of citizen science and community engagement.

Birds Canada is a national not-for-profit organization. For more than 60 years, we have driven action to increase the understanding, appreciation and conservation of birds in Canada.

This morning, looking out the window, I saw a chickadee holding its own in our Ottawa winter climate. Many people in Canada did what I did, since, according to Statistics Canada, almost 10 million Canadians have at least one bird feeder at home.

Birds are dear to our hearts. For many of us, they offer a wonderful gateway to nature.

Unfortunately, it is alarming to learn that we have lost nearly three billion birds in North America since 1970, or almost one bird out of three. This decline shows the global effects of the converging climate and biodiversity crises. Our ability to determine the extent of these declines is largely due to the work done by the people we call citizen scientists.

Birds Canada manages 44 citizen or participatory science programs that involve over 74,000 volunteers, or the equivalent of almost 2,000 professionals working full-time. To our knowledge, this is one of the largest citizen scientist networks in the country.

With partners, Birds Canada collaboratively manages such programs as eBird, which had over 1.75 million checklists submitted in 2022 alone, or one of the longest-running citizen science programs in the world, the Christmas bird count, which engages tens of thousands of volunteers every year.

Citizen science is accessible to all, from neophytes to experts. Beginners can participate in Project FeederWatch and report the birds that they see in their backyards. At the cottage, perhaps, they can participate in the Canadian lakes loon survey, which tells us how our emblematic loons are faring across the country. More seasoned birders might participate in provincial breeding bird atlases. These are comprehensive bird surveys, kind of like the census we do for humans. By comparing the results of atlases conducted at 20-year intervals, we gain understanding of the changes affecting an entire region. Such an undertaking would be simply impossible without the contribution of citizen scientists.

Enthusiasm for citizen science is increasing. We know this, because we see it in our numbers, with record-high participation in our programs, growing steadily every year. Citizen scientists help deliver real scientific and conservation impacts. In 2021-22, data from Birds Canada programs were used for 533 peer-reviewed publications. Citizen science data also helped to identify Canada's key biodiversity areas, which were officially launched this past year, and to produce such crucial report cards as “The State of Canada's Birds”. The list goes on and on.

Citizen science does more than just generate data. Volunteering as citizen scientists strengthens our connections to nature. It gets us outside, with great benefits for physical and mental health. Perhaps most importantly, citizen science can be a gateway to greater engagement with the issues in our communities.

Many of the citizen science programs at Birds Canada have been supported by the Government of Canada. For this we are very grateful. Our programs directly contribute to federal objectives and mandates, such as conserving migratory birds. We have a strong track record of leveraging government investments, more than doubling these contributions through private gifts—including, in fact, many charitable donations from the citizen scientists themselves.

We hope that by now it's clear: We believe citizen science is essential, and we want to see it continue to flourish in this country.

With that, we'd like to leave you with three short recommendations aimed at the federal government.

Our first recommendation is to invest, of course, in citizen science programs, including their backbone infrastructure. By that we mean the tools needed for these programs to work effectively in that scale—for example, the modern technological and marketing tools needed to communicate with thousands of volunteers. Perhaps this is something NSERC could support as part of its mandate to promote science to Canadians.

Our second recommendation is to support more citizen science opportunities at federally managed sites—for example, Parks Canada's proposed network of new urban national parks. This would provide co-benefits for human health, and engage visitors in conservation action.

Our third recommendation is to continue support for citizen science programs focused specifically on birds. Birds are recognized as indicators of the state of our environment and are very cost-effective to monitor.

Remember those 10 million Canadians who have backyard bird feeders? To us, there is no doubt that among them we have the citizen scientists of tomorrow. We just have to show them the way.

Thank you so much.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Thank you so much.

We're now moving on to Dr. Reynolds.

He wins the backdrop award for the best backdrop on Zoom today.

Dr. Reynolds, you have the floor.

[Dr. John Reynolds, Professor of Ecology and Conservation, As an Individual]

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.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Thank you kindly to both of our witnesses.

To start off our six-minute round, we have, from the Conservatives, member of Parliament Mr. Mazier.

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

Thank you, Chair.

Mr. Nadeau, in your opening remarks you referred to the seventies, and how many birds have been lost since then. How far back does that data go, and why the seventies? I've heard many organizations refer to those days.

[Jody Allair, Director, Community Engagement, Birds Canada]

I'll take that.

1970 is the nice round number where a lot of the earliest best data really comes from. A lot of that is breeding birds survey data. That's one of the federal government programs administered by Environment and Climate Change Canada, and is one of the key citizen science bird monitoring programs in North America. From 1970 onward, that's where we have a huge increase in the number of datasets we can use to pull significant results from. Generally 1970 is that benchmark going back, and lots of studies you see don't often go too far before that, although there are datasets that go longer. The Christmas bird count dataset, as you heard from Geoff LeBaron on Tuesday, is over 100 years old. Within our own database, we have data from Canada going back over 120 years.

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

I would be interested in that. Perhaps you could provide to the committee the datasets from citizen science versus government scientist science. How do those overlap, and over the years how has that evolved? How is citizen science becoming either more important to the program or less important?

[Jody Allair]

I would say it's definitely becoming more important, for sure.

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

If you could submit some data, some reports that you've done internally, that would be great.

Dr. Reynolds, you referred to eBird, which is a cool app, actually. I've been on it and trying to figure it out. You also talked about the data that comes in, and how many people you have submitting data. How do you ensure that's accurate?

[Dr. John Reynolds]

Individuals probably do make some mistakes, so the strength of that dataset is through the brute force of large numbers.

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

So there's no check on the system.

[Dr. John Reynolds]

Did a person really see six chickadees, or eight? Whether they had the right number of chickadees won't make a difference when you have this much data. It's allowing high-level visualizations of migration distributions, for example, things like that, even though individual records may well have errors. It's a good point, and it's something the scientists who analyze those data think about a lot.

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

We had CocoRaHS in here earlier this week, and they do have a regime of making sure the data is accurate before it gets put into ECCC. But there is no system in place to make sure that's actually accurate. You're just taking people's word for it.

[Dr. John Reynolds]

There is one other safeguard. I should explain that I'm not a birder, so I use the app, but don't have any involvement with the program itself. If somebody puts in something that is crazy, like they saw a dodo, or something like that, that will get flagged, and it will come to the attention of a regional reviewer, and they can ask them about it. That's an extreme example, obviously, but if it's something really out of place or a huge number of something that never occurs in those sorts of numbers, it does get flagged and the regional reviewer can ask them to correct it. If they don't correct it, the reviewer can simply remove that from the main dataset.

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

Okay. Thank you.

Going back to Birds Canada, you mentioned how your organization is funded. Could you expand on that, please?

[Patrick Nadeau]

Sure.

We're managing an overall budget of about $9 million at Birds Canada—and growing. We have six program areas. The program area where most of our citizen science work happens is called Assessing the State of Canada's Birds. That program area runs about $2 million to $2.5 million a year. The federal government is a significant contributor to that, and we're very grateful, but overall it's still less than half of that contribution. So, we have philanthropic contributions and lots of individual donors—and that's something that I think is really interesting to emphasize. In a charitable space oftentimes you'll hear that individual donors are the ones who are closest to the work. These citizen scientists are not only volunteering, but in many cases they're also financially contributing.

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

My Conservative colleague, Marty Morantz, introduced the supporting Canadian charities act last year. Bill C-240 would have incentivized Canadians to donate more money to charities such as yours, such as we're talking about. Experts projected that this legislation would have increased annual donations to Canadian charities by $200 million—$200 million—and, unfortunately, the Liberals and the NDP killed this bill by voting against it.

How important are charitable contributions to organizations like yours?

[Patrick Nadeau]

Those are vital contributions, and while I can't vouch for the fact that this would be the latest number, I would point out that the last I've seen is somewhere to the tune of four per cent. That's the slice of the pie that the environmental charitable sector receives out of all donations. Given the twin crises of climate change and biodiversity collapse, four per cent of the total pie is not a huge number so anything that charitable organizations can do to build momentum and build support from individuals, and to diversify their funding base, of course, is welcomed.

[Dan Mazier, Conservative, Dauphin—Swan River—Neepawa, MB]

Great. That's it, Chair.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Corey Tochor]

Thank you so much to our witness and for MP Mazier's questions.

We're now moving on to MP Collins for six minutes.