Where orchids bloom
Every year we ask the same question - when and where should we go to see orchids in bloom?
You can of course go to the inaturalist website, filter for some orchid species and date range and then see where there is observations. It's not a perfect way, some observations are of orchids not in bloom (some of them have pretty leaves after all, like Goodyera), and some of those observations might not be on public land (but require for example a research permit). But in general inaturalist observations are a good indication as to when and where you can see a species.
I decided to use the inaturalist API to get data about the amount of different orchid species observed in each lat/lon square. Plotting the data for Europe (using matplotlib) looks like this:
We get a mosaic of colored squares (well, almost squares, Mercator projection means lat/lon are not exactly the same distance) and the color tells the amount of orchid species in bloom. In this case filtered for May. By using interpolation it can also be made to look a bit nicer:
There is no extra information - but it just looks much cooler now. Next I also opted to draw a blue ocean and confine the color to land, to make it look neat. And I added some pretty pictures (of the 8 most observed species in a month).
So, looking at the above map, I suppose I could go to a lot of places in May - Vienna has a nice purple circle and would be closest to me. And if I want to see 50 species in bloom at the same time, Southern France or Italy.
What does it look like a month earlier?
Quite a change. The only yellow color that early in the year is way south in Crete. Greece and Southern Italy definitely look colorful already, as do Southern France and Spain and Portugal. What if we look a bit later in the year, like July?
All gone! The good place to see orchids now appears to be the high Alps in Austria, Italy, Switzerland and France as well as the Pyrenees in France and Spain.
Here's a map for the US in June:
Florida is a good place to be for orchids year round - but in the summer the Northeast is just amazing with orchids everywhere!
As final step, I create a picture for each month and stitched them together into an animation.
Most tropical areas, like Southern Florida, have plenty of orchids year round so my animations are not very interesting there.
Anyway, back to the reason for doing this all - where should I go to see orchids in bloom? I still don't really know...
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Very cool! Rent a camper and follow the hotspots ;-)
That would be my dream of course...
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