Thank you.
Thank you to the witnesses here today. I'd like to start with Environment Canada, and perhaps Mr. Marshall or anyone else can chip in and talk.
Other members of the committee know I talk about birds a lot. The North American breeding bird survey was mentioned. This, I would say, of all the things we've heard about is probably one of the most important citizen science programs in the world, certainly in North America, because it creates very strong and usable data over decades so that we can follow the population trends of birds. In doing so, we can then make inferences about where the problems of our environment are happening. We've heard that we've lost three billion birds over the last 50 years or so. That data comes 99% from the breeding bird survey. This is a program that's administered in Canada by Environment Canada.
I'm just wondering if someone would like to expand on that—perhaps some of the history and where this is used. Again, I could probably expound on it, but I'll let you take the floor and talk about when we are declaring species as threatened or endangered or of special concern. For birds, that data comes largely from the breeding bird survey, and it is a bigger dataset, by far, than we have for any other animal, plant or wildlife species.
Mr. Marshall, I don't know if you want to take the floor on that, but I think the importance of this program is important to get on the record.