The most comprehensive European zoo collections

lintworm

lintworm

Well-Known Member
15+ year member
Which zoos have the most popular animals?

Based on the data of this thread:
Ranking the stars; what are the popular zoo animals?

With a working system to estimate the relative popularity of all zoo animals, based on zoo nerds opinions, a whole new world opens and it becomes possible to see which zoos have the most popular species and the highest popularity score (sum of species presence*popularity score).

The calculations for this are relatively easy, I selected all species (groups) with an average popularity score of 25 or higher (out of 50 possible points), which means I assumed all species which got allocated at least half of all possible points were deemed at least moderately popular. This meant that 59 species (groups) were included in the analysis. 25 is off-course an arbitrary cut-off point and it means that large snakes, tapir, sea turtles, Platypus and Okapi just got lucky and were included. Sloths, ostriches, coatis, Llamas and anteaters just missed the boat. Including them wouldn't have made any real difference for the outcomes. To show my calculations below is a simplified example.

Zoo A holds:
Okapi & Tapir

Zoo B holds:
Giant Panda

Species scores:
Giant panda: 47,07
Tapir: 26,11
Okapi: 25,32

If one would just add up the popularity scores, zoo A would have an animal popularity of 51,42 and zoo B one of 47,07. This would thus mean that zoo A would be deemed to have a more popular collection by having two only moderately popular species, whereas zoo B has the most popular zoo animal. To correct for this I substracted all individual scores by 25 which means the species scores now look like:

Giant Panda: 22,07
Tapir: 1,11
Okapi 0,32

In this way having really popular animals gives you a bigger bonus than just having many less popular species. When comparing scores of real zoos using either scoring system doesn't make a huge difference, but with exceptions off-course, for example Wroclaw would make a large jump.

So enough talk about methodology, which zoos do have the highest popularity scores? The results are not very surprising for the top-4 spots, but there are some surprises in the top-25:
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The top-25 is obviously made up of some of the most species rich and popular zoos on the continent. The list does also include 2 safariparks with extensive walk-only sections (Beekse Bergen & Monde Sauvage) and some very ABC-focused zoos like Zoo de la Palmyre.


The zoos with the lowest popularity scores do obviously feature a number of bird parks and other specialist collections which hold very few ABCs like zoos focusing on European fauna (Innsbruck, Langenberg, Skansen and others) or domestics (Vyskov Zoopark). There are also a few smaller generic zoos with few ABCs represented. Note that all zoos for which I could confirm an annual attendance of at least 100.000 are included in this analysis, zoos with smaller attendance are not included.

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The final graph for this round shows the popularity index for what are arguably the top-20 major European zoos + Plzen. The list is off-course subjective but it includes Europe's largest collections, zoos with high historical importance (that still remain relevant today) and zoos which have the highest enclosure quality on the continent (or a combination of all three). Plzen is a bit of an odd one out, as it is a more an average zoo with an extra-ordinary collection than a real general heavyhitter, but based on Zoochatters disproportionally high interest in this zoo, I included it here. The results for this group are as expected, but it is noteworthy just how long TP Berlin and Plzen are ranked, despite the fact that they have huge attention from nerds for their collection. They just miss too many popular animals like sea lions and others.

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This ranking off-course benefits zoos with higher overall species counts and might not reflect true ABC zoos. So up next is an overview with the zoos that have the highest popularity scores when corrected for amount of species kept. In that way one can see how much attention a zoo relatively devotes to popular animals. Expect safariparks to do well there....

If you want to know a popularity score for a particular zoo, just let me know, but I won't be posting the whole list for now.
 
How did you land on subtracting 25 as your methodology? I'm in no doubt whatsoever that giant pandas are much more popular than okapis, but your points system rates them as approximately 69 times more popular. That seems a tad aggressive?
 
CGSwans said:
How did you land on subtracting 25 as your methodology? I'm in no doubt whatsoever that giant pandas are much more popular than okapis, but your points system rates them as approximately 69 times more popular. That seems a tad aggressive?
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The reason I did was because I used 25 as a cut-off point in the analysis, being the average score one could give in the survey. This is the simplest approach and I have substracted by a whole range of other values to see what would happen, but this number didn't actually have a big difference on the overall result. The correlation of original vs. corrected score had an r-squared between 0.96 and 0.99 when varying the number used for substracting (the higher that number the "lower" the r-squared). It would make a difference if there would be many zoos with only the most popular animals and many zoos with only moderately popular animals, but basically all zoos have a somewhat comparable mix of these two. As I did want to give higher importance to the most popular animals, I stuck with the easiest number.
 
I'm a bit surprised about the title of this thread.

Surely, the European zoos with the most comprehensive collections would be those with a range of invertebrates. While several zoos have animals representing several orders of mammals and birds, how many have several orders of insects? Many phyla could be exhibited using microscopes to focus images onto a screen, as in BUGS at London Zoo. Few zoos have more than a few phyla.

A comprehensive collection isn't one with all the bear species, but one with a good aquarium building and an invertebrate collection, as at the Berlin, Frankfurt and Cologne zoos.
 
Dassie rat said:
I'm a bit surprised about the title of this thread.

Surely, the European zoos with the most comprehensive collections would be those with a range of invertebrates. While several zoos have animals representing several orders of mammals and birds, how many have several orders of insects? Many phyla could be exhibited using microscopes to focus images onto a screen, as in BUGS at London Zoo. Few zoos have more than a few phyla.

A comprehensive collection isn't one with all the bear species, but one with a good aquarium building and an invertebrate collection, as at the Berlin, Frankfurt and Cologne zoos.
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You are right that the thread would (currently) be more correctly called most comprehensive ABC collection, but there are more graphs on a wider topic than that coming in the near future, which will make the thread title more fitting.
 
britishzoofan said:
I think one of the biggest surprises is that Chester is not in the top 25.
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I was a bit surprised but if only one bear, orang and rhino count whilst it doesn't have hippo or Sealion I guess that's how Colchester beats Chester on popular animals
 
Interesting how only 11 of the 'top 20'zoos in Europe made the top 25 list!! Good to see the much criticised Colchester as the top UK zoo! For once anyway,!
 
What is interesting to note is that Pairi Daiza has almost the complete set of ABC animals and there is very little to improve the score any further. Since it is unlikely they will start keeping Cetaceans, the only additions that would boost their total further would be Chimpanzee, Bonobo, Jaguar, Manatee and Okapi. As Jaguar and Manatee have already been mentioned in future plans, it is unlikely any zoo will take over the top spot anytime soon...

britishzoofan said:
I think one of the biggest surprises is that Chester is not in the top 25.
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Apart from Koala, Giant Panda, Walrus and Cetaceans, Chester also lacks some of the common ABC's like Polar & Brown Bear, Gorilla, sea lions, seals and Common Hippo. So it is not very surprising it is missing there.

pipaluk said:
Interesting how only 11 of the 'top 20'zoos in Europe made the top 25 list!! Good to see the much criticised Colchester as the top UK zoo! For once anyway,!
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Colchester has sea lions and squirrel monkeys, which e.g. Chester lacks and has quite a comprehensive ABC collection
 
Before we move on to the next topic, I though it would be interesting to show the top-10 of most comprehensive ABC collections for UK, the country which sees the most users and for Germany, Europe's largest zoo destination. What is noteworthy is that scores for the UK are generally much lower than in Germany, the UK has only 9 zoos which reach the 200 point margin (and only 5 above 210) , whereas Germany has 23 (18 of which top the 200 point margin). In the UK safariparks and outlaying zoos are well represented, whereas the German high hitters are all traditional establishments and Hodenhagen, Germany's only main safaripark, only comes in place 24.

The UK top-10:
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The Germany top-10:
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Most ABC-friendly zoos

Looking at absolute animal popularity scores per zoo is interesting, as it gives an insight as to which zoos cater best to what we think are perceived visitor's wishes. Such an approach does favour zoos with very high species counts. It is also interesting to see which zoos have the highest ABC-scores relative to their species numbers. Zoos with a high score tend to keep less species, but focus on having as many ABC's as possible within their collection. For this I simply divided the total vertebrate species richness of a zoo by it's popularity score.

The top-25 zoos is heavily dominated by Scandinavian, UK and French zoos. The total absence of German zoos and near-total absence of Eastern European zoos is also noteworthy
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The bottom-25 zoos are dominated by specialist collections and some zoos with extremely high species richness. Note that I have excluded aquariums from this list (as I did in the earlier posts too).
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When looking at the 20 European top zoos + Plzen it is interesting to note that none of them are really ABC-focused collections. The outlier here Doué is ranked as number 57 overall, Nürnberg is number 109 and Zürich is number 153. As all the top zoos bar Nürnberg and Doué have sizeable ectotherm collections this shouldn't really be a surprise.
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Most ABC-friendly and unfriendly zoos in UK and Germany

The above post focused on which zoos in Europe were the most ABC-friendly and which ones were least ABC-friendly. I will now focus shortly on how that situation looks in the UK and in Germany and there are some surprising differences between the two. In general UK collections tend to have a much stronger focus on ABCs and Germany, especially its top zoos much lower relative focus. This can largely be explained by the fact that most German heavyhitters have sizeable bird collections and often significant aquaria as well.

The most ABC-focused zoos in the UK consist of safariparks, both Aspinall collections, primate heavy zoos and some of the newest zoos in the country:
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The zoos with the lowest ABC-focus are birdparks, the UK's two only real historical city zoos and some smaller collections.
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For Germany values are generally lower and with only one Safaripark (which tops the chart) it is the "erlebnis"-zoos that score high, as well as some of the smaller major zoos:
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The zoos with relatively the lowest ABC-scores are 4 of the most species rich zoos, two birdparks (the only two German birdparks in the analysis), as well as two small zoos with a large number of ectotherms (Bochum & Darmstadt). The outlier here is Görlitz, which is a small zoo with a collection specialised in Central Asian animals. They show that a small zoo with a good concept and better execution doesn't need the ABC's to be successful.
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In the next post we will move away from ABC animals, but rather look at which zoos have comprehensive collections from a taxonomic point of view.
 
Most comprehensive zoos for Mammals based on taxonomy

After dealing with zoos which have the most comprehensive ABC collections. It is now worth having a look at which zoos have the most comprehensive collections from a taxonomic point of view. I have only prepared data for mammals, as the rest would be far too much work.

When looking at orders, many orders (24 out of 29) are represented in Europe and it is unsurprising which zoo has the highest number of them:
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It helps to have a nocturnal house and/or focus on small mammals. It is also good to have multiple species of Marsupials (more than kangaroos). Randers Regnskov might be a surprising addition and probably does the best job of any zoo to show many different orders, while only having a limited mammal collection.

When looking at how many mammal families each zoo keeps, out of the 97 families (out of a total of 156) currently represented in European zoos, there are again many of the same zoos around. A strong focus on small mammals or having a nocturnal house helps tremendously, just as having a large number of marsupials:
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What you can see here is that this list corresponds relatively well with the zoos that keep most mammal species overall. It is interesting that this list doesn't correspond very well with which zoos keep most mammal rarities. That is something I will cover in the next post and though there are some obvious zoos that do well in both statistics, there are many zoos with high family diversity, that have hardly any rare animals for a zoo nerd (Amsterdam and Sosto to name 2).

Looking at Europe's arguably top-20 zoos + Plzen it is clear that zoos that focus more on enclosure design or are seriously limited in space show lower family diversity.
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When zooming in on UK zoos it is non-surprising to see Chester top the list, but it is interesting to see that many zoos that didn't have many ABC species, do show many different families.
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The presence of Hamerton is not surprising here, but noteworthy for such a "small" zoo. Longleat scores very high for a Safaripark and this is one of the very few times we will see London do well on any metric.

German zoos do keep somewhat more families than the UK ones, but the difference is less pronounced here than in other metrics:
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Next we will have a look at which zoos have the most mammal rarities, both in terms of species and rarities. Expect to see some different zoos and big contrasts.
 
amur leopard said:
TLD will not be happy :D
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Oh, Plzen may be in my top 10 favorite zoos but I think it would struggle to be in my top 20 best were I to compile a more empirical list.

Also, remember that during the Zoochat Cup I openly noted that I likely would nit have gone to bat so hard for Plzen had Prague not had an unlucky knockout.
 
TeaLovingDave said:
Oh, Plzen may be in my top 10 favorite zoos but I think it would struggle to be in my top 20 best were I to compile a more empirical list.

Also, remember that during the Zoochat Cup I openly noted that I likely would nit have gone to bat so hard for Plzen had Prague not had an unlucky knockout.
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Ah yes, the distinction between best and favourite arises yet again. :)

Oh I do remember you saying something of the sort during the cup. Do you really like Czech collection or is it more that you enjoyed yourself particularly at both collections? Although having said that I do remember you having a hand in Prague's downfall (though Chester was the opposing collection). Looking back on that I wouldn't have been able to make my mind up in the tie it was so tight.
 
amur leopard said:
Do you really like Czech collection or is it more that you enjoyed yourself particularly at both collections?
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The latter, although Prague *is* at the top spot for both my favourite and best zoo.

amur leopard said:
Although having said that I do remember you having a hand in Prague's downfall (though Chester was the opposing collection).
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Yeah, it was a bit of a wrench having to do that :P the two were very closely tied in that match, so it would have been disingenuous not to argue wholeheartedly for both of them to the best of my ability whilst noting Prague had the edge.
 
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