Mushroom Observer is a collaborative

mycology Mycology is the branch of biology concerned with the study of fungus, fungi, including their Taxonomy (biology), taxonomy, genetics, biochemistry, biochemical properties, and ethnomycology, use by humans. Fungi can be a source of tinder, Edible ...

website started by Nathan Wilson in 2006. Reproduced on th
MykoWeb
website. Its purpose is to "record observations about

mushrooms A mushroom or toadstool is the fleshy, spore-bearing fruiting body of a fungus, typically produced above ground on soil or another food source. ''Toadstool'' generally refers to a poisonous mushroom. The standard for the name "mushroom" is ...

, help people identify mushrooms they aren't familiar with, and expand the community around the scientific exploration of mushrooms". The community of about 12,000 contributing users collaborates on identifying the submitted mushroom images, assigning their

scientific name In Taxonomy (biology), taxonomy, binomial nomenclature ("two-term naming system"), also called binary nomenclature, is a formal system of naming species of living things by giving each a name composed of two parts, both of which use Latin gramm ...

s by means of a weighted voting process. All photographs are subject to a

Creative Commons license A Creative Commons (CC) license is one of several public copyright licenses that enable the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted "work". A CC license is used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and bu ...

that allows their reuse by others without the need for remuneration or special permission, subject to the terms of the license. The software is

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

and hosted on

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

Growth

As of 2024, the website contains about half a million user-submitted mushroom observations illustrated by more 1.6 million photographs of nearly 20,000 species of fungi. In 2010, the website contained about 53,000 user-submitted mushroom observations illustrated by 101,000 photographs; up from 7,250 observations and 12,800 photographs in 2008.

References

External links

github.com/MushroomObserver
MushroomObserver software under

MIT license The MIT License is a permissive software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts very few restrictions on reuse and therefore has high license compatibility. Unl ...

on GitHub Mycological literature Biology websites Creative Commons-licensed websites Creative Commons-licensed databases Internet properties established in 2006 Free software programmed in Ruby Citizen science {{mycology-stub