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 12,000 contributing 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

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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.[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]

References

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  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 7 June 2024.
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