Mushroom Observer is a collaborative

mycology Mycology is the branch of biology concerned with the study of fungi, including their genetic and biochemical properties, their taxonomy and their use to humans, including as a source for tinder, traditional medicine, food, and entheogens, as ...

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 Sporocarp (fungi), fruiting body of a fungus, typically produced above ground, on soil, or on its food source. ''Toadstool'' generally denotes one poisonous to humans. The standard for the na ...

, help people identify mushrooms they aren't familiar with, and expand the community around the scientific exploration of mushrooms". The community of about 10,000 registered users collaborates on identifying the submitted mushroom images, assigning their

scientific name In taxonomy, binomial nomenclature ("two-term naming system"), also called nomenclature ("two-name naming system") or binary nomenclature, is a formal system of naming species of living things by giving each a name composed of two parts, bot ...

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 "work" is any creative material made by a person. A painting, a graphic, a book, a song/lyrics ...

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 the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

and hosted on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

Growth

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

fungi A fungus ( : fungi or funguses) is any member of the group of eukaryotic organisms that includes microorganisms such as yeasts and molds, as well as the more familiar mushrooms. These organisms are classified as a kingdom, separately from ...

References

External links

github.com/MushroomObserver
MushroomObserver software under

MIT license The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license comp ...

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