 This morning, I recognize that we may all be in different places for this virtual event. I'd like to take a moment to acknowledge that for those of us who are on the North Shore, this event is taking place on the traditional ancestral and unceded territory of the Squamish, Slewa Tooth, and Musqueam nations. So I encourage everyone to take a moment now to reflect on the land on which you are on and if you feel comfortable or you know to share it in the chat. If you are uncertain as to which ancestral territory you live on, you can visit whose.land or native-land.ca to learn more about the traditional lands on which you reside. As humans, we all engage in a continual process of learning and unlearning. Today, I am grateful for the chance to connect with and learn from Emma. Emma is the Wildlife Forever Program Manager from the BC Parks Foundation and she will take us through a discussion about how we can support conservation and science across BC by becoming a citizen scientist. So I will pass it over now to Emma. Thanks, Rebecca. Good morning, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm going to be sharing some slides today and if you have any questions, feel free to stick them in the chat and I can address them at the end of the presentation. And I know we can't share video or audio today, but I'll check the chat out at the end. So I'm just going to get my slides up here. Perfect. Okay. Good morning. My name is Emma. I'm a Program Manager with the BC Parks Foundation, as Rebecca said, and I've been with the Foundation for just over a year and a half, and I will be talking a little bit about what we do. We're a fairly young organization so if you're just meeting us, I'll give you a bit of an overview of our mission. Today I will be talking about citizen science and just so that everyone is aware, there is a transition in the community to using the term community scientists as well to sort of create a more inclusive term for those who may not be citizens of Canada. So I will be using community science and citizen science and sort of using both what we're transitioning to using community science. As Rebecca said, I also want to acknowledge that I live and work on the traditional ancestral and unceded territories of the Coast Salish people, which is the Musqueam, Squamish, and Slewa-Tooth nations. And also as Rebecca said, tonight we will be taking, we'll be talking a lot about getting out onto the landscape, especially in provincial parks. And I just invite everyone to be curious about the traditional land that we're on all across the province. And there are a few good resources out there. I've put them down the corner as well, natipland.ca and Hoosland, which is actually being developed by Indigenous Peoples. So that's another great resource if you're curious about whose territory you're on. So this is a little bit of a roadmap for today. I'm just going to do a small introduction to the BC Parks Foundation and myself. And then we'll dive right into what citizen science or community science is exactly and how you can take part and why you should take part. And then we'll have time for questions at the end. So the BC Parks Foundation, we are an independent foundation, but we are the official charitable partner of BC Parks. We were created in 2017 by the provincial government and started operations in 2018 as an independent foundation. Much like a hospital or a university foundation, we helped to enhance parks above and beyond what the government is able to do. And that's all parks and protected areas inclusive. We work cooperatively quite a lot with BC Parks and are probably their charitable partner. Our mission is to enhance and pass on the legacy of BC's world-class provincial parks by catalyzing support and resources so they flourish forever, with the vision being that BC has the best park system in the world, supported by an active, diverse and innovative local and international community. In a lot of our experiences fundraising for parks, BC's parks have international fans who support them. So we actually have the sixth largest park system in the world if you didn't know, so lots to be proud of and lots of work to do. We also work with many other foundations and many partners around the province to leverage funding and to service projects in parks across the province. We have a number of different programs. If you're curious, they're all on our website at bcparksfoundation.ca. On top of working directly with specific parks and enhancing the park system, we do have a number of programs that we run independently. On the left there is a photo from our first day hike, which is part of our Healthy by Nature program. That was the first day of 2020. We took out groups of people who had limited access to the outdoors and did a hike on New Year's Day. Healthy by Nature aims to connect people with nature in a deep, meaningful and consistent way. And within that we also have just launched Canada's first park prescription program. So if you want to learn more about that, you can go to parkprescriptions.ca. It's exactly what it sounds like. Doctors are not able to prescribe time in nature, but especially in parks as a way to support mental and physical health. So I encourage you to take a look at that website. Down at the bottom there is a photo of one of our 2020 lovely park ambassadors, which is a program that we piloted last year and will now continue this year. So keep an eye out for park ambassadors, discover park ambassadors in your local parks. They'll be offering interpretive and educational activities. And up top there is a citizen scientist, my friend Kate, and she will segue us perfectly into our citizen science and community science information. So what is community or citizen science? It's also known as participatory environmental monitoring. I don't know anyone who has called it that, but it is the mouthful sort of definition is reporting of data relating to the natural world by members of the general public. In essence, it is everyday people may not be scientists collecting very valuable data about nature in ways that support science. So one of the most important parts of citizen science is the collaborative aspect and support from professional scientists. As you can imagine, the involvement of scientists and researchers is critical to the design of all these programs and also necessary for interpretation of results following and to help maintain a high standard of quality across the data. So really integral collaboration sort of process. You can imagine why citizen science is so valuable. It offers us a way to collect lots of data over lots of space and a lot of land at a very low cost. It is sort of a volunteer thing if we had to pay researchers to collect as much data as everyone in BC could imagine how long and how expensive that would be. And of course, conversely, it also offers the public a way to become involved in conservation and research, get outside and learn a lot more about the local species around them. So through community science, lots of data can be collected and then basically inform conservation in the long term. COSIWIC, which is the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, has actually already made decisions around species at risk using community science to support those decisions. But community science can offer many different things. It can document range expansions, especially as climate change and global warming begin to impact biomes and climactic zones and things begin to shift. Citizen science offers us a great way to track where species are going and their ranges. It's a great way to track invasive species and report them so that they can be addressed and handled. It's great continuous disease monitoring. If you're looking at a plant that looks a little funky and you take a photo, even if you don't know what's wrong with it, once it's in the community science database, then someone who does might be able to help and also help detect species at risk, as I said with COSIWIC. So it's a great way to kind of keep an eye on the populations of all living things in the province. The main tool that I'm going to be talking about today is iNaturalist. It is the main one that we promote at the BC Parks Foundation. There are many different platforms and we'll talk about them a little bit later. But iNat is sort of the go-to, very well-rounded tool. It is a website and a free app that is used worldwide. It was started in the States and it is essentially a way to share photo observations of everything. Plants, animals, birds, fungi, scat, animal tracks, and it's now this massive database Canada I believe has over four million observations now. So iNat's just a really becoming really, really popular website and app, and it uses artificial intelligence to provide identification of species from photos. It's also a great way with that to learn about the species that are around you and find out what species are nearby. These are a lot of our field team who have been out in BC Provincial Parks observing all the different species that live there, all taking photos to use on an iNaturalist. So these are the iNat basics. If you have your phone, feel free to download iNaturalist on your phone and you can sort of follow along. The basics of the iNat app are you find something, you take a photo and you upload it and then provide all the details. So as you can see in the screenshot, apologies for the sirens in my background, as you can see in the screenshot, once you've taken some photos, the app actually suggests in the what did you see area, the app will suggest the species that you're looking at. We'll go over that a little bit more in detail later, but that is the starting point. It can be as as general as a family or a genus or down to the species level. Then from there, you add those details in the second half. So what, where and when, if you're using a smartphone, those are readily available to you. The where and the when are automatically our phones are tracking us all the time, which comes in handy with iNat. It's all the photos will be geotagged and have an exact time and date. So if you're using smartphone, there's that if you're not and you're using a point and shoot camera, you can fill those in manually. Location or geo privacy is fairly important with iNat. If you have privacy concerns, you can make observations private completely. You can obscure them, which means that it creates more of a general kilometer by kilometer area around an observation or it can be publicly accessible. And then the last key part is the captive cultivated in the image. But essentially it's whether or not a species is wild. So I am in Chinatown in Vancouver. And if I took a photo in someone's garden, it's not chances are it's not a wild flower. It is a cultivated species. So if I took a photo and I just wanted to know what it was, but I was uploading it, I would just be sure to mark it as a cultivated observation because it is wild. And then you hit save. And that is pretty much all you need to know. The observation then gets uploaded to share with the community. And then you can kind of check back on the observation as it is identified. So adding observations within the app, like that screen I just showed you, it's great for really rapid species ID kind of guidance, especially if you have connection. You can figure out what you're looking at pretty much right away. As I said with smartphones, it's easily geo tagged, but it is better for smaller numbers of photos. If you have gone out and let's say you didn't have data or your phone was on airplane mode or you had an appointment to shoot camera, and you come back with 25 or 30 photos you'd like to upload, doing batch uploads like that, I very strongly encourage everyone to do them on the website. The other sort of plus for the website versus the app is any profile changes or profile settings are a lot easier on the website. And so there's a few sort of community and wider settings that are a lot easier to handle on the website. The app is really great for just public observations fairly quickly. So the ID system, the artificial intelligence of my naturalist, which is why I love it so much is on the left there you can see this is actually a screenshot from the website. Once you take a photo, this is what I was referring to earlier, the website will suggest an identification for what you're looking at. So you can see it says we're pretty sure it's in this genus, but the top suggestions for species are directly underneath that. And if you're looking at those photos of those species and thinking it doesn't look quite right, then you can leave it as the genus. And this is where the community part of community science kind of comes in on our naturalist for an observation to be what's called research grade for it to be a usable piece of data. It needs to be identified by three members at minimum of the community that agree on the identification. So if you were pretty sure it was a Leather Star and you hit Leather Star and two people came along and agreed with you, your observation is then a research grade observation, it's then a legitimate piece of data. So you can see on the right hand side there, my friend Kelly had an observation, you can see three agreed on IDs. So it is a real space is million, then the research grade observation pops up there at the top. You can also have a casual grade observation, you know, if you upload something maybe without a great photo and so no one's quite sure what it is. And so it doesn't get agreed upon identification. I still strongly encourage you to upload it. There may be value in, you know, knowing that it's probably the species in this area. So by all means, don't be discouraged if you don't have the research grade after a while. It's also as I not gets bigger and bigger, it can be slower and slower for the community to agree on identifications for observations because there are so many, which is a wonderful problem to have. But just know that the research grade stages can just take a while that community members need to come along and agree with the identification. So that's sort of all you need to know in order to use iNaturalist. I'll go through a few quick FAQs about iNat. These I have cultivated from many presentations and talks and the most frequently asked questions and concerns. Number one is usually, can I protect my photos? So especially for photographers who make income off of their photos, putting them up on a website where they're publicly accessible can be a little nerve-wracking and I totally understand. So the can I protect my photos question answer is absolutely. iNat does have the capability to set copyright permissions on all of your photos. You can also set it photo by photo or they can apply to all of yours. So that is a way to legally protect your photos. They can't be used for other people's commercial use or otherwise. There is also a range of copyright. So you can also have that you it's welcome to be used for non-commercial use with credit if you're interested in that. So there's lots of options there. I encourage you to check out the forums and sort of see what the strengths and weaknesses are of each copyright permission. Location sharing and privacy is probably the second most common concern, which I also absolutely understand. We are all used to our phones tracking us and it's not necessarily something that people want to continue to do, especially when they're outside in nature and they just want to get away from it. Totally understand that. As I said, a point and shoot, a DSLR, anything that can take a photo, you'll still be able to take observations. It doesn't need to be your phone. It can be your phone on airplane mode, etc. So there are lots of options for ensuring that you feel that your privacy is still taken care of. And beyond that as well, the privacy of the species as well. So with, as I said, those sort of different location sharing settings, you can have a observation with different levels of protection. And I'll go over that a little bit later. But what are projects? I'll be discussing projects in a little while. If you've explored INAT at all, you will see the projects are this sort of other area of the website. It's a fairly dated reference at this point, but I like to refer to them as they're very similar to Facebook groups. They're sort of a way to gather people or gather observations that fit a specific guideline and group them together. So I'll be speaking a little bit about the BC parks, I naturalist project. But there are family projects where you have a leaderboard and you can see who has the most observations. There is Salal watches, because it's an incredibly used to be a very common species, and in some areas it's becoming endangered. So there are projects dedicated to observations of Salal and BC. So you don't need to use a project. And many projects are also geographically bound. So anything within a geographic boundary will be automatically grouped into that project. So if you're not concerned about setting them up, you really don't need to worry about projects that much, but just know that they are something to explore. And if you'd like to target certain things or with certain groups of people, those are the best ways to do it. What if my kids are too young? What if INAT feels a little bit too old, a little too techy, but this sounds like a really great tool. Enter, seek, which I again very strongly recommend. It is sort of the kid friendly, I naturalist version. It was just a wonderful invention with INAT. Part of the reason it is so kid friendly is there's no registration, there's no user data collected. It's much sort of safer in that sense. And the location is always obscured. So it's got a level of privacy that's ensured. And within the app, there are challenges and badges, but it still uses the same artificial intelligence system as INAT. So kids can still just take a photo of something and automatically know what they're looking at. So it's a really wonderful learning tool. Kids have phones younger and younger these days, but this is just a really wonderful way to turn that phone into a surveying instrument and to figure out what species the kids are looking at. So I'll just highlight a few other citizen science or community science platforms in case you're curious about what else there might be for you to use. INAT is up at the top there. eBird is another wonderful platform. If you're a bird enthusiast, eBird or birds Canada, they were actually our partners for the last year and they're great. So that's another great platform. The Whale Report app, which is down there in the bottom of the screen, is dedicated to cetaceans. So it's run by the BC Cetacean Sightings Network, which is operated out of ocean wise. And it's actually directly plugs into boat traffic and warnings for so that we can protect our whales and our cetaceans. So if you're out on the water or you've seen a whale, that's a really great platform to use. Some other platforms, the Report Invasives app, it's fairly basic, but it's great. And that also its observations head straight to the Invasive Species Council of BC. So if you are confident in your ability to recognize invasive species, go for it. I would use Report Invasives. The great thing about INAT is that it does mark things as invasive. And so that's still part of the observation. And you may not have known it was invasive, and then you'll learn that from your observation. So that's a couple of highlights of those platforms. And this is a description of the BC Parks INAT project. So this is part of my job that I love is I get to work in this partnership between ourselves at the Foundation, University of Victoria, Brian Strozomsky, actually out of the University of Victoria in the Strozomsky lab, and Dr. John Reynolds out of SFU. Dr. Brian Strozomsky and Dr. John Reynolds are our two academic partners. And then we also work with BC Parks in sort of a partnership between the four of us. And this began in 2019. Pre-COVID, it meant a lot of public engagement and bioblitzes. But 2020 was still a great year for the project. In the first year, there was a goal to reach 10,000 observations. We reached just over 100,000, which was wonderful. And we're now getting very close to 300,000. And so we're going to go for half a million this year. So if you're in BC, provincial parks and protected areas, please do collect as many observations as you can. It might be obvious, but observations in parks are especially helpful, so that we know we're protecting. And as parks are sort of this protected and left as they should be areas of the landscape, it means that we can get a much better idea of what's going on in the in the natural world versus areas impacted by industry or recreation or otherwise. So the BC Parks INAP project is something I really strongly encourage people to take part in. One of the other things that you can do is join BC's Big Nature Challenge. So this was my big project last year. And we had the goal of reaching a million observations by the end of 2020. We hit that goal by October. British Columbians came out in droves and just kicked ass at that goal. And we're currently, actually, we've just passed 25,000 observers in BC up from about 12,000 at the beginning of 2020. So people have just taken to it really quickly. And this year, we're going to go for that two million goal. We're just over 1.5 million. So we're doing really well. And this on this project, we worked with eBird, Birds Canada and the Whale Report app to sort of group our observations and create a much more comprehensive bank of observations. If you want to learn more about that, just visit naturechallenge.ca. And you can also let me know if you have any questions at the end. So why become a community scientist? Lots of reasons. Number one is an activity when you're outside. It's a reason to stop and literally smell and then take a photo of the roses. The Park Prescriptions program that I mentioned earlier, we've been working a lot with doctors and the medical evidence that shows the benefits of spending time in nature really only kicks in when we're really aware and connected with nature around us. If you're walking through a park very quickly on your phone, you're unlikely to actually really benefit from the outside time and that green time. So this is something to do and to meaningfully connect with the species around you and really get the most out of your time out in nature. You can learn if you are like me. I love learning about the species that are around me and it becomes a little addicting once you can just figure out what you're looking at really quickly. So it's a great way to learn and identify species for your own interest. It's a great way to connect with the community of naturalists. I not really began as just a community for naturalists to share information and has just exploded into this be a myth of information. And so it's a wonderful way to connect. You can follow people, you can message them. So it's a great way to connect with this community. It's somewhere to put all your photos. If you're like me, I have hundreds of photos of beautiful flowers and trees and other species that I've taken on hikes and I don't really do anything with they sit on my computer. This is somewhere to put them and they are incredibly valuable. Plus if you have the dates and they span a fairly large time scale, that is incredibly helpful. You can imagine the more kind of backlog data we have, the more we can forecast and the more that we have learned about the past, which is just great. You can set up your own projects. If you want to have a family competition, you can set up a project. We have species projects as I mentioned earlier, salal project. There's a provincial invasive species project. So there's lots of different ways to kind of set up those specific areas of interest. And it's a great way to share your ID knowledge. This is something I really, very much highlight. If you have any kind of a biology background or you've done work and you know a lot about these species, maybe even for your own curiosity, we badly need, as we call them, armchair naturalists who can help identify these mountains of data so that they can be used. So if you have identification knowledge, this is a great way to share it. It's data. If you are a scientist or a researcher, this is somewhere to get open source data and it's an incredibly powerful way to download. You can set in lots of different metrics in your query and download very specific batches of data or wide ranges of data. So this is a wonderful place to get it. And lastly, you can feel good about helping decision makers allocate funds and resources and manage VC's nature and just contribute to the data banks that help to inform those decisions. And if you need one more reason, here you go. You can join this incredible movement that has just exploded over the last couple of years and it's just getting bigger and better. So one more reason is just to be part of the movement of community science. And as the bank gets bigger and bigger, it's a great way for British Columbians to sort of exemplify how much we care about VC's biodiversity and protecting it. So these are just some of the wonderful new stories that we were part of last year. Just to finish up here, I do have a couple tips and tricks for taking photography, for taking photos of different species around the province. All of this information is on the naturechallenge.ca website if you'd like to take a look at it, because the quality of the photo really does impact the quality of the observation and the ease of identifying, as you can imagine. So here are a few quick tips and tricks for different groups of animals and plants. For any observation, just please do keep in mind that getting close to things without bothering them is really important, especially if they're animals, don't get too close. The trick is, I've always heard with bears, is if you put up your thumb and your thumb doesn't cover the animal, you're too close. And please don't go off trail. We're not going to trample over a bunch of species to take an observation of one and just follow the information that's provided at your local parks for that. Crop your images if you can so that it's just the species and take as many photos and as many angles as you can in general. That's just really helpful. You can also upload, as I mentioned at the beginning, you can upload scat or animal tracks. You can upload sound recordings as observations. So if you heard a bird, but you can't see it and it picks up an MP3, you can record it and upload that as an observation, which is great. And please also don't touch things, don't pick them up and move them so they can be in a better place for the photo. Lotions and sunscreen, especially during the summer, can be toxic to a lot of animals. So try not to touch anything. Really space is key. We want observations but not at the cost of disturbing any of the biodiversity in the province. So there's also a full multi-multi-page photography guide available for download on the BC Parks Foundation website that was created by our academic partners. So if you're a keener and you want to take a look at that, that's another wonderful resource for you. And just a note, when you are taking photos of species around the province, one of the other concerns that people have, and rightfully so, is location of threatened or vulnerable or endangered species. I had a park ranger once very concerned about people eye-netting rare plants that occur in the conservancy where she was working, because seed theft is a thing. And if the exact location of that plant is shared, then people might traipse into the park and go and try and take it. Or you can imagine if someone has seen a bison out in the middle of the country and they know exactly where it was. Tourists might flood to go find where it is or in BC. If there's a grizzly somewhere, we don't want people running to find it based on an eye-net observation. So, A, just keep in mind that you can obscure or make your observation private. But B, eye naturalists does actually have some built-in capabilities that protect that from happening. So, one of the things the eye-net does is it does maintain a list of threatened, vulnerable, endangered species. And so in BC, for example, if you upload a photo of a zebra mussel, it'll be noted as invasive. If you upload a photo of mountain goats, it will be marked as a threatened species. So, it does take note of those things. And once an observation is uploaded and has been identified as a threatened, endangered, or vulnerable species, the location is automatically obscured on that observation. And the only ones who can actually see that are going to be the trusted and registered scientists and researchers who can download the data. So, just be aware that if you do upload something and you see that it's threatened, the website has systems to make sure that that species is protected. So, again, all of these photography tips are on naturechallenge.ca if you want them. My last sort of plug for the foundation is the Wildcam Network, which is also part of my program. Wildcam was started in 2019 as a partnership between ourselves. We provide mostly the administrative support. Many academic and government researchers around the province. And it was a group of people that came together and wanted to create sort of a hub or a central meeting point, a central sharing point for remote camera work, which of course sounds very academic, but many people have began to introduce remote sensor cameras in their backyards or have motion sensor cameras on their property to know what birds, animals are around their property. So, if you have one of those things, I really encourage you to sign up at wildcam.ca and you can join Wildcam as a citizen scientist and share data that way. So, I really encourage anyone if they have those cameras and if you have questions, let me know. You can also email info at wildcam.ca and we can help you out. Wildcam is in British Columbia and now Alberta as well. So, it's a whole western Canada network. The goal is to support the effective management of wildlife by coordinating camera trap work. So, citizen science data using cameras is also incredibly helpful and all of this information is on the website as well, but these are sort of the ways that Wildcam works to support the community, creates a bit of a community and it's also full of resources and tools for setting up studies or different ways to manage your data or process the data. And it also has a few blogs and you have a newsletter and stuff like that. So, some different engagement and learning opportunities there. Thank you so much. That is the end of my presentation. If you have any questions, feel free to email me or follow me on iNaturalist. I'm always here to answer questions or concerns and be sure to check out the iNaturalist project at BC ParksFoundation.ca. You can find it through there and also download some toolkits and other resources. And that's it for me. Thanks so much, Emma. That was great. Yeah, I've toyed around a little bit with the app so far, but it's nice to get all of that different context and hear about all the different projects and getting things that are going on. Great. What's them? If anyone has any questions, they can pop them into the chat there or they have your contact info that you just showed as well, which is awesome. Thanks. No problem at all. Yeah, if you have any questions, please do feel free to email me. It's Emma.Greeks at BCParksFoundation.ca. Any questions come up or if you know anyone that's interested and then they have questions, give my email out. It's totally fine. I'm here to help all the new and emerging community and citizen scientists and PCs. Thank you. All right. Well, if there are no questions, at least currently, I think I'll go ahead and end the webinar now. But yeah, thank you so much again, Emma. We really appreciated you taking the time to share your expertise and knowledge with us. And yeah, hope to see you again too. Grace, thanks everybody. Thanks for coming. Bye. Bye.