Posted: 28 Apr 2015 04:34 AM PDT
Orchid Observers has been launched by Zooniverse and the
Natural History Museum as part of the Constructing Scientific
Communities project, to look at the impact of climate change on the
flowering time of UK orchids.This new project asks citizen scientists to take part by taking photographs of wild orchids during spring and summer 2015 and uploading them to the project website. Participants can also help by carrying out online research to identify uploaded orchid photographs and to extract data from the Natural History Museum’s 15,000 specimens gathered over the past 300 years. By examining the results of the photographic and online research, scientists can look at flowering times from past and present to assess the effects of climate change.
For further information on the project and how to take part, please visit the Zooniverse and Natural History Museum websites.
At a glance
Record orchid flowering times.Type of activity: Outdoor and online
Who can take part? Everyone
When? Outdoor photography: April to September. Online activity: any time.
How long will it take? Outdoors: 15 minutes. Online: 10 minutes per record.
Cost: Free
Photograph wild orchids and extract data
from three centuries of Museum specimens to help us examine what impact
climate change is having on the UK’s orchids.
Why we are doing the project
Fifty-six native species of orchid grow wild in the UK, flowering from April to September.Recent research indicates that climate change is affecting the flowering time of the early spider orchid, Ophrys sphegodes. We want to find out if this is true for other wild orchids and whether all species are responding in the same way, starting with 29 species.
To gather data from across the UK, we need as many people as possible to photograph orchids this spring and summer, and to send us the images with the date and location.
Alongside this, we have around 15,000 orchid specimens in the Museum's British and Irish herbarium. Collected over three centuries, they can tell us about flowering times in the past. Extracting data from so many specimens is a huge task, so we need your help.
How to take part
Outdoor photography activity
1. Read the photography instructions PDF (141KB) and the identification guide PDF (16.1MB) to find out which species we are targeting.2. Take a walk in your local area to look for orchids.
3. Photograph any orchids you see.
4. Upload your photographs at www.orchidobservers.org
5. (Optional) Use the online tools to identify your orchid.
Online activity
1. Visit www.orchidobservers.org (registration is optional).2. Choose to identify photographs others have uploaded, or extract data from the Museum's historical specimens.
3. Follow the online instructions to identify the orchid in the photograph or record the collection date and flowering stage of the historical specimen.
