Owner Nathan Wilson Registration Optional | Commercial no Launched 2006 | |
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Available in English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish Website | ||
Mushroom Observer is a collaborative amateur mycology website started by Nathan Wilson in 2006. 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".
The community of about 4,000 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. The software is open source and hosted on GitHub.
Growth
As of 2013, the website contains about 126,000 user-submitted mushroom observations illustrated by 335,000 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. On March 2016 Mushroom observer offers approx. 600,000 photos and 200,000 observations.