Data for the ‘Orchid Observers’ project

The data will enable UK orchid distribution and population health to be assessed in detail. Orchid Observers will create modern records from across the UK combined with historical data to build up a 180 year time series of orchid flowering times that can be compared against key climate variables. Using the Zooniverse platform, participants can upload their photographs of orchids in flower in their own area, help identify the species in each photograph and classify the flowering stage. Volunteers can also extract valuable information from the 15,000 historical herbarium sheets in the NHM. Once the complete dataset has been fully verified and analysed for publication, the historical (i.e. herbarium) data and 2015 field observations will be made freely available through the National Biodiversity Network (https://data.nbn.org.uk/) and NHM Data Portal (http://data.nhm.ac.uk /). As of November 2018, two files from Orchid Observers had been deposited, both containing raw data from Zooniverse (milkman data) which is unedited and non-annotated. The files contain transcription data for the historic herbarium specimens presented through Zooniverse for people to describe. An additional dataset of field observations of orchids via the project has not yet been deposited as they are associated with personal information (e.g. name of observer) and in some cases contain precise locational data for species of conservation concern. All observations have though been shared with the Botanical Society of the British Isles (www.bsbi.org), who share all non-sensitive records as open access via the NBN Atlas (www.nbnatlas.org). Once the authors’ research papers have been published, a full, cleaned set of the analysed data will be deposited. Orchid Observers is a collaboration between the Natural History Museum and the University of Oxford. The project is located on the Zooniverse platform and has been developed as part of the Constructing Scientific Communities 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. The Natural History Museum (NHM) wants to find out if this is true for other wild orchids and whether all species are responding in the same way. The Orchid Observers project will investigate effect of climate change on the flowering times of 29 of the UK orchid species. The project asks volunteers to carry out field photography and biological recording, with online transcriptions of the 15,000 historic herbarium specimens in the NHM. The herbarium specimens were collected over 300 years, which tell researchers about the flowering times in the past.