Mushroom Observer is a collaborative mycology website started by Nathan Wilson in 2006.[1] Its purpose is to "record observations about mushrooms, help people identify mushrooms they aren't familiar with, and expand the community around the scientific exploration of mushrooms".[2]

Mushroom Observer
Photograph of a Boletus edulis observation recorded on Mushroom Observer
Available inEnglish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish
OwnerMushroom Observer, Inc.
URLhttps://mushroomobserver.org
RegistrationOptional (for viewing), Required (for voting and commenting and creating observations)
Launched2006
Content license
Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike with or without "Noncommercial" restriction

The community of about 10,000 registered users collaborates on identifying the submitted mushroom images, assigning their scientific names by means of a weighted voting process.

All photographs are subject to a Creative Commons license that allows their reuse by others without the need for remuneration or special permission, subject to the terms of the license.[2] The software is open source and hosted on GitHub.[2]

Growth edit

As of 2018, the website contains about 311,000 user-submitted mushroom observations illustrated by 945,000 photographs.[3] 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.[1] As of November 2018 Mushroom Observer offers approximately 945,000 photos and 311,000 observations of 15,000 species of fungi.[4]

References edit

  1. ^ a b Wood, Michael (Summer 2008). "WebWatch: Observing Mushrooms" (PDF). Fungi Magazine. 1 (2). Retrieved 8 October 2010. Reproduced on the MykoWeb Archived 2011-08-10 at the Wayback Machine website.
  2. ^ a b c "Introduction". Mushroom Observer. Retrieved 8 October 2010.
  3. ^ "Site Statistics". Mushroom Observer. Retrieved 22 June 2013.
  4. ^ "Site Statistics". Mushroom Observer. Retrieved 6 March 2018. Images 945080, Observations 311120, Listed Taxa 62802, Observed Taxa 15440, Authored Name Descriptions 4312, Defined Locations 12812, Authored Location Descriptions 847, Species Lists 685, Species List Entries 89263, Proposed IDs 299937, Comments 113454, Votes 418612, Members 6558

External links edit