Science and Research committee  Yes, that's essentially how it works. Birds and birding are for everyone. Obviously, from my perspective—I've been a birder since I was a kid—birds are really important to me, but they're also extremely important indicators of environmental change on our planet. These types of programs are invaluable for understanding not only how birds are doing but how we're impacting our planet, and as John might attest, unfortunately a lot of the other taxa, as fascinating as they are, don't get that same kind of representation.

Science and Research committee  Yes. Certainly, I can't really get into the specifics of how the sprawl's going to have particular impacts. Obviously, it's going to have very negative impacts. I think under the theme of citizen science, one of the solutions and one of the things we try to promote is engaging more people directly.

Science and Research committee  I can go first. There are a variety of impacts that affect birds. There was a publication in Avian Conservation and Ecology, which is the journal that we co-publish here in Canada, looking at human-caused mortality factors of birds. It did document all the biggest mortality factors facing our birds, from a human perspective.

Science and Research committee  It's great to see iNaturalist featured here. We're all addicted. To interpret your question about reporting, we report on all our birds on a very regular basis through program reports. All our data also gets contributed to “The State of Canada's Birds”, a report that comes out every few years.

Science and Research committee  We have a real diversity of citizen science programs. Some are very structured and more rigorous, and others are more entry-level programs to engage the next people into science and citizen science. With all of those programs, a unifying factor is that data quality is taken very seriously.

Science and Research committee  I think investments in the infrastructure of these programs are obviously really key and at Birds Canada we have a variety of programs. We run 44 different citizen science programs and engage with about 74,000 volunteers every year, and in order to do that you do need proper infrastructure, everything from our database system, and we've got a very sophisticated database called NatureCounts.

Science and Research committee  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.

Science and Research committee  I would say it's definitely becoming more important, for sure.