Orchid Pollinator Study: Engaging Collaborators & Volunteers to  Crowdsource Native Orchid Pollinator Information - an Opportunity to Participate

Who's Pollinating Our Native Orchids?
We're Working to Find Out.

Orchid conservation isn't just about protecting plants — it's about protecting relationships. Pollinators drive orchid diversification, sustain wild populations, and shape evolutionary processes from speciation to adaptation. Yet more than half of North America's native orchids have no documented pollinators at all. Many are known from just a single observation, at a single location. For a continent as ecologically diverse as North America, this is a critical blind spot.

The gap exists for a simple reason: waiting beside an orchid for a pollinator to appear — then catching and identifying it — is painstaking work that few researchers can do at scale. So we automated it.

Using motion-detecting Raspberry Pi camera systems and machine-learning video analysis, NAOCC and our collaborators are building the first continental-scale database of native orchid-pollinator relationships. Our network includes Dr. Jasmine Janes in Canada, researchers at Texas A&M University and George Mason University, and trained volunteers across the US and Canada. We deploy cameras at multiple sites across each species' range — capturing pollination visits on video, identifying the pollinators, and quantifying pollinator diversity across each species' full distribution.