Orchid Observers: a citizen science project | @GrrlScientist

Scientists at London's Natural History Museum recently launched a citizen science project that will document how wild British orchids are responding to climate change

A few years ago, a paper published in the Journal of Ecology reported that an orchid that grows wild in the UK and parts of Europe was blooming earlier than it was 150 years prior. In that paper, the authors examined field records of flowering times for the early spider-orchid, Ophrys sphegodes, for two time periods and compared the shift in peak flowering times to historical springtime temperature variations (doi:10.1111/j.1365-2745.2010.01727.x). The first time period extracted relevant data from herbarium specimens collected between 1848 and 1958; and the second time period recorded observed peak flowering times for this orchid species in the field between 1975 and 2006.