A new and exciting citizen science project has begun and it’s time to get involved with Orchid Observers! This research project, in partnership with Oxford University’s Zooniverse platform, aims to examine the flowering times of British orchids in relation to climate change.
In order to achieve this, we are inviting the amateur naturalist and professional botanical community, alongside nature loving citizens from across the country, to help us collect and sort orchid data.
We want you to go out in the field and photograph any of 29 selected UK orchid species and upload your images onto our dedicated website, www.orchidobservers.org. Flowering times from each of your records will then be collated and compared with the extensive Museum herbarium collection, and data from the Botanical Society of Britain & Ireland (BSBI), totalling a 180-year-long time-series of orchid records.
The primary aim is to further our understanding of the impacts of the climate on the UK’s flora, using orchids as a model group. The extensive data set that you will be contributing to, will tell us how different species of orchids are responding to changes in temperature and rainfall across the UK.
Field work: We are asking observers – like you – to record orchids by simply photographing the flower spike and uploading the image to our website, with a location and a date. To aid you with identifying the orchids, we have painstakingly produced a lavish ID guide (PDF) complete with images, descriptions, flowering times, and distribution maps. There’s also a short guide (PDF) for how to take the most helpful photographs for the project.
Online work: We have over 10,000 herbarium orchid specimens from around the UK, stretching back over three centuries. In order to calculate any change in flowering times we need you to help us sort through images of our herbarium sheets and transcribe key information such as the species, location and flowering condition. This is one that can be done at home on your PC, or when out and about from a mobile device.
If you would like to get involved with the project either online, or in the field, then go to visit www.orchidobservers.org. The orchid season runs from April until the end of September so the first species are starting to flower right now – time to get your camera out!
Mike Waller
Mike Waller is one of the new identification trainees working at the Angela Marmont Cente for UK Biodiversity. His passion lies in botany and ornithology with a particular specialism in European orchids.
P.S. We moved to WordPress as a new blogging platform for the Museum during 2015. To see the earlier posts in the Citizen science series, visit our archive.