The Shroom App is a Website for mushroom foragers and those who wish to become one!
It provides a map that gives information on the probability to find mushrooms at any point in germany. The probabilities are updated daily and have a resolution of 100 meters.
They are calculated based on the current season, daily weather information pulled from Deutscher Weather Dienst and the vegetation / forest type at any given point.
It is of course not possible to give certain information when and where wild mushrooms grow, but the map should give some information where you could start searching and if the current weather conditions are favorable or not.
The app is in constant developement, if you are an expert in the field of mushroom foraging, please consider supporting the project by giving your expertise on optimal weather / forest conditions (See below How to contribute).
The application is currently hosted on my private server and can be reached here.
IMPORTANT: Please be careful when going foraging and only gather mushrooms that you know. Collecting unknown mushrooms may kill you, and mushroom poisining is certainly not a way you want to go out. If you want to start out with mushroom foraging, consider joining a local mushroom club. If you are unsure if a mushroom you have collected is edible or not, there are experts you can consult. In Germany, they are called Pilzsachverstaendiger and you can probably find one near you. Better be safe than sorry when it comes to wild mushrooms!
Mushroom foraging is a field that has seen a constant decline over the last decades and the knowledge about great techniques and spots keeps getting lost over time. A major factor in this developement is the difficult accessability of this hobby; mushrooms may be deadly if you don't know what you are doing. So you need to start by learning about mushrooms and how to identify safe ones before you can start the fun part of actually foraging and, most important of all, eat wild mushrooms.
There is already a large number of great sources to learn about mushrooms: Mushrooms clubs, Grandparents, Pilzsachverstaendiger, Youtube-Channels, Internet Blogs and so on.
But the community is very protective about great spots to find mushrooms, which makes it difficult for beginners to find mushrooms that they can safely identify: "Where is a place to search for mushrooms near me?", "I want to find a certain type that I know, but I only find other unknown mushrooms, am I in the wrong area?", "Is today a good day to find anything or will I walk around for hours without finding a single one?".
This may lead to frustration for people new to the field and maybe even lead them to disregard mushroom foraging all-together.
So this is the aim of the Mushroom App. To give public information on good areas to start searching for certain types of mushrooms and to hint on how favorable the weather at a certain day in a certain area is. The current road-map of this project also plans on adding soil information to the calculations, which will further increase the accuraccy where to search for specific mushrooms. I further plan to include a feature that allows people to share positions, where they found a certain mushroom. This information may be included into the processing for even greater prediction accuracy. If you want to support the development of those features, please read the below section.
As I'm currently developing this alone, I would really appreciate support! If you have any ideas on how the app could be improved or find a bug, feel free to open an issue or even better, create a pull request.
Especially if you are a web-dev or an expert in mushroom hunting, you may be of great help as I am not a great expert in either. You can drop me an E-Mail over mushrooms@vogel-server.de.
Furthermore the app is currently only targeted at Germany as this is the place where I live and for which I have data. If you come from an other country and want to help expand the app to it, feel free to get in touch with me.
If you want to contribute, please read the Installation Guide for this repo. It contains information on how to set up a dev environment locally and how the general structure of the app looks like.