Thank you very much.
It's a true pleasure to be able to join you today, in person this time, in the sacred spaces of Parliament and from the unceded territory of the Algonquin people. I'm sad that our friend, the Honourable Kirsty Duncan, is unable to be here today, and I wish her a speedy recovery.
I am chair of biology at the University of Ottawa, where I also hold a research chair. I'm past president of the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution, and I'm a long-standing member of NSERC.
Like each of you, I care deeply about making a difference for others. I mostly try to do this through science. I've spent most of my research career working to understand how human activities affect biodiversity.
Everyone here will know that we are in the midst of a human-induced mass extinction, the likes of which we have not seen since the end of the age of the dinosaurs. This time, our own activities are the cause. To solve this wicked problem, we require an “all hands on deck” approach to understand how biodiversity is changing.
In recognition of that imperative, a post-doc on my research team, Maxim Larrivée, and I created eButterfly at the University of Ottawa 12 years ago and launched it simultaneously in French and English. Why butterflies? Because they are an indicator for how other species are doing and because they are so beautiful they can inspire the most cynical among us. eButterfly now uses artificial intelligence to help identify species from digital photos that anyone can take with a cellphone anywhere on earth.
Does such data make a difference? A few years ago, I set out to test and answer this question.
Over the past 130 years, professional scientists collected 300,000 observations of 297 different butterfly species across Canada's vast land mass. Using eButterfly, citizen scientists doubled that number in seven years. These volunteers found species in places overlooked by professional scientists and sometimes detected them at times of the year that were either earlier or later than we had previously thought possible.
The real magic happens when you combine both citizen and professional science data. That approach provides a much more complete picture of how Canadian species are responding to human impacts. In other words, citizen science data transforms our understanding of how global changes affect Canadian biodiversity, and now we know enough to take critical steps to protect species and their ecosystems. Such strategies figure prominently in the COP 15 Montreal agreement to conserve biodiversity, including to protect 30% of the world's surface by 2030 and to halt and reverse nature loss and species decline by 2050.
How will we test whether such policies are actually working? We must take a global “all hands on deck” approach, combining professional and citizen science and honouring the distinct ecological knowledge of the world's indigenous peoples. Big science needs big data, and citizen science helps us get that vital ingredient.
Canada is already using such data to help monitor the state of its threatened species, including monarch butterflies through eButterfly's mission monarch project. There's a great need to expand monitoring efforts to include other groups of species and to address other kinds of problems, but just as importantly, scientists must be willing to throw open the doors of their ivory towers to embrace more inclusive ways of measuring the world we all share.
The rapid growth in citizen science programs around the world and in Canada suggests that more scientists are willing to do just that, but we must guard against repeating the mistakes of the past, which might cause scientists to work with an unrepresentative few in our diverse country.
In the future, I hope citizen science programs will touch everyone's lives, supporting indigenous communities in their own languages and helping to inspire and include people who are under-represented in our scientific organizations.
I hope governments in Canada will ask how citizen science programs can help to make the kinds of differences for others that motivated many of us to pursue our careers in science.
Thank you.