Science and Research committee  The example of incoming data I gave you was from eBird, which is the standard global platform for submitting checklists of birds. I told you that 16,000 checklists had been submitted today, but that's out of date. It's now 18,400, so 2,000 more have been submitted in the time we've been speaking.

Science and Research committee  It's run out of Cornell University, and they fundraise for that.

Science and Research committee  In the last few years, about 10% or 15% of our status reports use iNaturalist data. It's the first place people often go when they're trying to decide whether it's worth paying attention to a potentially threatened species.

Science and Research committee  Go ahead, Jody.

Science and Research committee  It's a little bit different. For COSEWIC, speaking on behalf of COSEWIC, there the.... I guess in some ways it is similar in that the scientists on the committee will decide what are the best data that we need in order to understand what the status of the species is. Those data are very often, as we've heard, citizen science data.

Science and Research committee  Yes. The reason the New York Times said that it was one of the nicest on-line platforms was the way that people support each other and help out with that. We've all experienced all kinds of examples of things that we have misidentified, put it up as something else, and then it gets corrected quite quickly in a very supportive way.

Science and Research committee  For events like the great backyard bird count and the city nature challenge, which go on, these are generally not run at the federal level, although they could certainly benefit from federal funding. The way to reduce costs would be if there was some funding made available to make them happen.

Science and Research committee  I see. I haven't really thought about it, to be honest, but if a national park or a provincial park wanted to do a bioblitz to encourage a very large number of people to come there, I wonder whether there could be some sort of subsidy for camping fees, or something like that. E.C.

Science and Research committee  When we had Canada's 150th anniversary, there was funding—I believe it was federal funding—to sponsor bioblitzes. These are community events where people go out to try to find and photograph as many plants and animals as possible in a given period of time, like a weekend or a day or whatever, and iNaturalist is the go-to app for reporting on these.

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

Science and Research committee  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.

Science and Research committee  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.

Science and Research committee  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.