During 2015 citizen scientists photographed and identified flowering wild orchids in the UK. Now we need your help to extract flowering date information from over 10,000 images of orchid specimens in the Natural History Museum's collections. Collected over three centuries, they can tell us about flowering times in the past. Together, these datasets will enable Natural History Museum researchers to examine the impact climate change may be having on the flowering time of the UK’s orchids.
Extracting data from so many specimens is a huge task, so we need your help. Get involved at www.orchidobservers.org
Background:
Fifty-six native species of orchid grow wild in the UK, flowering from April to September.
Recent research indicated 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.
Funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council.
