I’ve recently realized I really enjoy searching for mushrooms on hikes. Been doing it for a few weeks now and have seen dozens of different kinds of mushrooms, it’s been amazing! But a lot of the areas I’m in have no cell reception and am not able to upload photos to inaturalist for identification. Is there an offline app or should get some books on mushroom identification? Also is inaturalist the best app for online identification, and is a topside and underside image enough for an accurate identification?
lol, the main way I identify mushrooms is with books - I don’t know any serious mushroom people that use apps, it’s all about taxonomic keys and using books to identify.
This is region specific - but look for identification guides for your region: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_about_mushrooms
In North America I highly recommend Alan Bessette’s books if you are serious about this.
You should find a local mycology club and join them - they will know what books to get for that region.
Thank you I will check out Alan Bessettes booms. Appreciate the help
It depends on the mushroom. Some are easy to identify, while others may require a spore print and/or microscope. Mushrooms Demystified is a good book for the west coast of the US. It’s heavy on text and not on photos so you will need to study a lot to use it well. It’s also not a field guide.
All That The Rain Promises is a fun and accessible book to start with.
I love inat but DO NOT use it to identify mushrooms, I don’t know how it’s algorithm works but it certainly is not more accurate than a good guidebook. Idk if it looks at both the top and underside, but if you’re trying to be 100% thorough oftentimes you also need to look at the spores a mushroom gives off, which inat can not help you with
Depending on where you live there are guidebooks for your region, or at least east vs west coast
Good to know about inaturalist, I didn’t have a good feeling about the identifications it gave me. OK I’ll get a guidebook for my area. Any author you’d reccomend?
From what I can tell all the popular field guides are written by locals to each area of the country, I’d just look up ‘mushroom guide [region] reddit’ and see what pops up
Right on thanks!
