Citizen Science

Volunteers are the eyes and ears of Environment Canada. Thanking citizen volunteers: Science and the Environment Bulletin takes the opportunity, with this special end-of-the-century insert, to salute the vital contribution volunteers make to Environment Canada's science through ecological monitoring.

They come from every walk of life and every region of the country—farmers, doctors, students, cashiers and clerks who spend their free time scanning the skies for signs of a tornado or listening for frogs on the banks of a marsh. They are the eyes and ears of Environment Canada: volunteer monitors who collect environmental information that enables our scientists to determine how and why ecosystems are changing.

Volunteers have been gathering weather and climate data, counting birds, surveying wildflowers and monitoring streams for more than a century. It wasn't until the past decade, however, that the number and diversity of volunteer monitoring programs increased dramatically in response to the growing need for broad data on the environmental impacts of human activity and climate change. To ensure the quality of its science, Environment Canada uses standard methods for collecting, reporting, managing and analyzing these data, and provides training and feedback to its volunteers. Much of the work the Department carries out today would not be possible without their efforts.

Air

The National Climate Archive in Downsview, Ontario, houses more than seven billion observations collected across Canada over the past century and a half. A large number of these have come from volunteer climate observers—a network of more than 2 000 people from every province and territory in the country. Every morning before eight o'clock, and every evening after five, these dedicated individuals head out into their backyards, schoolyards, churchyards or farmyards to take minimum and maximum temperature and precipitation readings using a rain gauge, a ruler and a thermometer housed in a louvred wooden box called a Stephenson screen.

For some, these observations have been a ritual for over 50 years or a duty passed down through their family for three generations. Either way, long-term, continuous observations of specific regions of Canada add an important page to the story of our climatic past—a story that is not only crucial to understanding climate change, but is also used in myriad ways by city planners, policy makers, engineers, farmers, insurance companies, the tourism industry and others. For the past half century, information on the climate of the Great Lakes, Hudson's Bay and the eastern and western seaboards has also come from volunteer observers aboard some 300 commercial ships, whose hourly records of temperature, fog, visibility, barometric pressure and other variables are also used in weather forecasting.

Another network of volunteer atmospheric observers originated some 20 years ago from the need for improved public safety in weather-sensitive areas such as the Tornado Alley region of southwestern Ontario. Now covering every province from coast to coast, approximately 7 000 severe weather watchers keep their eyes on the skies for signs of everything from thunderstorms and funnel clouds to blizzards and hailstorms—reporting the exact time and coordinates of severe weather to meteorologists at any hour of the day or night. Vital to issuing timely weather watches or warnings, severe weather watchers not only provide ground-truthing for automated observations, but in many cases—including the devastating Edmonton Tornado of 1986—have spotted problems before they were detected by radar.

A special kind of weather watcher, members of the Canadian Weather Amateur Radio Network (CANWARN) are volunteer ham radio operators who have been specially trained to spot and report on severe weather conditions. Initiated as a pilot project in Ontario in 1987, CANWARN has spread west to Alberta and east to New Brunswick, and now has more than 2 000 members—all of whom keep a hand-held radio at their side 24 hours a day. This enables them to report on up-to-the-minute conditions, even during extreme weather events when phone lines may be out of operation. To help reduce weather-related traffic accidents, 55 CANWARN volunteers in Shelburne, Ontario, have also been trained to spot snow squalls, whiteouts, freezing rain and other hazardous winter conditions.

Land and Water

Volunteers also help to monitor the health of our terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems by measuring the types and quantities of pollution they contain. Environment Canada's marine debris research program, a partnership with Pitch-In Canada, depends on some 20 volunteers who survey debris at 13 beaches on the east and west coasts every spring and fall. Their finds, which range from food packaging to automobile parts, indicate that many sources of marine debris are land-based activities. This information is used to formulate regional and national programs to address these sources, including information campaigns.

Students involved in the international Treewatch program take measurements of biodiversity in a forested plot to help scientists track habitat changes over time.

To determine levels of pollutants that aren't visible to the naked eye—including chemical and bacterial contamination—many volunteers monitor the quality of water in our lakes, rivers and streams. This is just one aspect of the work that communities involved in the Atlantic Coastal Action Program conduct with the help of Environment Canada's Science Linkages program. About 100 volunteers with the Clean Annapolis River Project, for example, perform regular water quality tests and observations at sites on the Annapolis River and its tributaries in an effort to chart water-quality changes in the watershed, and to determine the origin of pollutants. A similar effort was carried out in Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia, this summer, when 80 volunteers took part in the first-ever two-day Detect the Doo Doo Festival. Initiated to determine the sources of fecal coliform bacteria that have caused area closures to shellfish harvesting, and to formulate an effective liquid waste management plan for the area, the festival is expected to become an ongoing volunteer monitoring program in the year 2000.

Sampling is just part of the effort for students, members of environmental organizations and other trained community volunteers in central British Columbia, who also help monitor the health of the Salmon River by collecting, identifying and counting tiny aquatic invertebrates that make the tributary their home. Monitoring the composition of the invertebrate community at different sites makes it possible for scientists to draw inferences about the health of the river and, ultimately, about the extent of habitat degradation caused by such things as organic enrichment or sedimentation.

Flora and Fauna

Because living organisms are sensitive to environmental changes, long-term data on abundance, distribution and population trends are not only an indicator of ecosystem health, but also an essential component of species management. The fact that birds are found in every ecosystem in the country, are generally easy to see and hear, and that people enjoy watching them has made them the most monitored creatures in the world. In Canada, many thousands of volunteers participate in a wide variety of bird surveys coordinated or supported by the Canadian Wildlife Service.

One June morning each year, some 700 expert birders from across Canada volunteer to drive one of 400 designated routes, pause for three minutes at 50 evenly spaced intervals, and identify the number and species of all the birds they see or hear during that time. Known as the Breeding Bird Survey (BBS), this exercise has yielded 33 years of population trend information on 260 species of landbirds.

The Canadian Migration Monitoring Network was initiated six years ago to help fill in some of the gaps of the BBS, which covers only populated regions of the country. More than 400 trained volunteers monitor populations of about 100 key species of migratory landbirds at a network of 18 field stations located in every province except Prince Edward Island. In addition to making daily counts of all the birds that pass through these areas for the duration of spring and fall migration, they also help to remove birds from nets so they can be banded, a practice that yields important information about species productivity, stopover ecology and migration routes. Since many of the sites are located far from urban areas—such as at the tip of southern Ontario's Long Point, which is accessible only by boat—many volunteers live at their stations for a large part of the season. In total, volunteers donate the equivalent of 6 000 days of work to the network each year.

Students from the Académie Lafontaine, near St-Jérôme, Quebec, gather data on freshwater fish as part of a Biosphere Ecowatch Network program aimed at tracking the health of the St. Lawrence River and its tributaries.

Less regimented counts are carried out by volunteers in the form of Bird Checklists, which are surveys of birds observed at different sites and times of the year in the Northwest Territories, Alberta and Quebec. Active for more than a decade, Quebec's checklist program receives data from over 1 000 birdwatchers each year, and has proven useful in documenting changes in the distribution and abundance of bird populations in the province over time. Volunteers also play an important role in the production of provincial and regional Breeding Bird Atlases, which describe the nesting sites and distribution of various species. Five years of surveying by thousands of volunteers, each of whom is assigned a 100-square-kilometre area to report on, go into creating a single atlas.

Some volunteers become heavily involved in the long-term monitoring of specific species, such as one man who has performed regular counts of seabird colonies in southwestern Nova Scotia for the past 15 years. His efforts, which include collecting detailed data on breeding success and mortality, have taught us most of what we know about Canada's tiny population of Roseate Terns. Other counts take place infrequently but are highly intensive, such as the Great Lakes gull survey, which is conducted only once every 10 years. During May and early June, 34 volunteers assisted with the most recent tally, spending long days on the rocky islands and shores of the Lakes counting nests in colonies that ranged in size from several to tens of thousands of nests.

A monitoring program of a different type, Environment Canada's national Wing and Tail Survey asks hunters to send in the wings or tailfeathers of harvested ducks and geese so that scientists can use information on species, age and sex to set bag limits and establish conservation objectives for the following season. For one week in January, at the annual Wing Bee, dozens of trained volunteers assist in identifying and recording data on some 25 000 samples. This information on population dynamics, which has been collected annually for three decades, tells us much about how habitat loss and degradation are affecting wetland species over the long term.

Because amphibians are suffering population declines for the same reasons, frogs and toads are an important focus of the Marsh Monitoring Program. About 250 volunteers survey these tiny creatures by listening for their distinctive mating calls, which are easily identified using a special training cassette. At dusk during the spring and summer, these intrepid individuals make their auditory counts as they walk or paddle a canoe around one of the marshes in the Great Lakes Basin. Their reports are used as baseline information for restoration efforts in areas of concern, as well as in comparing how these marshes differ from one another. Another 250 volunteers carry out auditory and visual surveys of wetland birds found in the same region.

But marshes aren't the only places Canadians count amphibians. Two other counts are carried out by some 300 volunteers in Ontario each year: Road Call Counts tally the species occurring at various stops along a designated driving route, and Backyard Surveys take place outside rural homes or at nearby wilderness areas. Road Call Counts are conducted three evenings a year—once each in April, May and June—because the province's 13 different species of frogs and toads call at different times of the season. Backyard surveys take place after sundown between April and the end of July. In both cases, results are best on warm, foggy nights, when amphibians are most active.

Two years ago, Environment Canada's Ecological Monitoring and Assessment Network (EMAN) began developing an early-warning system for the detection, description and communication of ecosystem change, one aspect of which is EcoWatch—a national volunteer monitoring program that collects data on a wide range of environmental indicators. In building EcoWatch, EMAN has expanded a number of existing programs, including the Toronto Zoo's Frogwatch, developed protocols for generating sound scientific data, and set up systems for reporting and mapping observations on the Internet so that volunteers can see the results of their input immediately. By making environmental monitoring fun and easy, and by tapping into the enthusiasm of student volunteers, EcoWatch is building a database of long-term environmental information on virtually every region of the country.

Other EcoWatch programs include Plantwatch, in which student observers monitor and report on the budding and flowering times of certain wildflower species. The dates of these events are correlated with weather data to monitor changes in the climate through the assessment of changing life cycle and seasonal patterns. Treewatch is an international program in which schools and communities establish plots in forested ecosystems and record the species, location, height and diameter of the trees they contain. These measurements, taken every five years, provide scientists with baseline information on species richness and abundance and are used in determining changes to habitat. Two new programs—Wormwatch and Lichenwatch—are being launched this winter, the latter aimed at using the natural sensitivity of lichen species to air quality as an indicator of environmental health. Others are in the works.

Another EcoWatch program, headed by Environment Canada's Biosphere in Montréal, has more than 70 volunteer groups involved in projects to rehabilitate and gather information on the St. Lawrence-Great Lakes ecosystems. The monitoring side of the Biosphere Ecowatch Network includes such projects as Freshwater Fish Ecowatch, in which students from 20 schools spend time each year catching fish in the St. Lawrence River and its tributaries, measuring them, making general observations on their health, and releasing them. Four years of data from the study are currently being analyzed to determine how the health of the waterway is changing. Other changes are being charted by the staff of some 10 commercial sightseeing companies in the Bas-Saint-Laurent area, who have been trained as part of the Marine Mammals Ecowatch Network. By counting marine mammals such as whales and seals, mapping their distribution and breeding areas, and monitoring their behaviour, these volunteers have discovered some interesting trends— including the movement of seals further into the St. Lawrence River in recent years.

Birdwatchers at Last Mountain Lake, Saskatchewan-a migratory bird sanctuary and national wildlife area, and a regional Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network site.

The efforts of the many thousands of Canadians who volunteer their time and energy to monitor the pulse of our natural world are an invaluable contribution to Environment Canada's science. Human climate observations spanning more than a century have enabled scientists to test the accuracy of complex computer models in predicting the future state of our climate. Human observations have detected changes in the populations of birds, amphibians and other animal and plant species over time, and helped establish effective conservation efforts for species at risk. Together, these and other data collected through volunteer monitoring efforts vastly improve our understanding of how human and natural processes affect our air, land, water and wildlife, and help to ensure the health of our environment in the new millennium and beyond.

For more information on these and other programs—or to become a volunteer monitor yourself—please visit the S&E web site at [www.ec.gc.ca/science] or contact Environment Canada's Inquiry Centre at 1 800 668-6767.

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