WHAT WE DO

British Columbia's biodiversity is globally unique, and the highest in Canada. Ecosystems range from temperate rainforests that receive over 3 meters of rain per year and are home to endemic species found nowhere else on earth, to dry desert-like landscapes reaching 40°C in the summer months and -30°C in the winters. British Columbia is home to tens of thousands of plant and animal species living in a rich diversity of habitats and ecosystems, and many of our parks have been created to protect some of these sensitive ecosystems and species.

We are a team of naturalists and researchers working to engage the public in community science to photograph and document the species in our provincial protected areas, and beyond. We promote broad engagement with people in the province to upload photos of plants, animals, and fungi to community science platforms such as iNaturalist, and each summer a field crew with "the best job in the world" travels the province to record as much biodiversity data as possible while fostering relationships with Provincial Parks staff and volunteers that broaden the species knowledge of all involved.

How the program was created: a very short history

The BC Biodiversity Program was initiated by Dr Brian Starzomski (University of Victoria) and Dr John Reynolds (Simon Fraser University). We wanted to better understand the species that make up BC’s amazing biodiversity, using the huge community of skilled naturalist that live here. John and Brian first started to run biodiversity survey project for their students as part of their university courses using just their smartphones. Students would take photos, work to ID the species, put the photos into a PowerPoint presentation, and voila! A species collection project was done. Based on these sorts of projects, Brian even put together a field guide for BC’s Great Bear Rainforest called the Central Coast Biodiversity Project.

By 2018, it was becoming clear that community science apps like eBird and iNaturalist had improved so much that anyone could contribute great geotagged species observations. This could complement and enhance the excellent collections in important institutions like our universities, the Royal BC Museum, and the Beaty Museum. iNaturalist in particular made it easy to record and map observations of any species, and the computer vision that helped identify species photos lowered the barrier to participation. Anyone could contribute to better understanding nature!

We chose to focus on BC Parks because they contain many of the most beautiful, important, and biodiverse landscapes in the province. We decided to create individual iNaturalist projects for all of the 1,000 + parks and an umbrella project to pull all the observations across the parks system into one place, where anyone could view it: https://inaturalist.ca/projects/bc-parks . We also wanted to build on the training aspect of our work as professors, by hiring and training field staff – undergraduate students and recent graduates - to spend their summers doing the best job in the world: hiking through BC’s most beautiful landscapes all day while recording the species they encountered.

In 2018 we applied for a grant from BC Parks’ tremendous living labs and license plate programs, and that’s when things started to take off. We made all the iNaturalist projects in January and February of 2019.

Before our field teams began their surveys in May of 2019, there were only 17,000 iNaturalist observations in BC Parks. But guess what? By the end of Summer 2025, that number has skyrocketed to over 1.2 million! Incredible! We have also now trained 24 early career biologists by hiring them as summer naturalists. They typically document hundreds of species per day, with photos and audios, supplemented by collections for museums of select species. We track observations from each season using the BC Big Summer teams project, so everyone can view their progress: https://inaturalist.ca/projects/bc-big-summer-teams

Since then, we’ve been delighted to have received continued funding from BC Parks and other fantastic organizations like the Sitka Foundation, the Pacific Wildlife Foundation, and the Hakai Institute. They’ve all been behind us, supporting our ongoing surveys. And now, over 16,000 people have joined this expanding community and contributed their observations to the BC Biodiversity program. It’s truly a community success story, and we’re so proud to be a part of it!