“The [mushroom ID apps] all had 4-star reviews or more.
Such evaluations are nonsense, since the ratings are done by people even less
knowledgeable than I am!”
Mushroom identification apps for your smartphone - a critical appraisal
The Cowtown Curmudgeon Denis R. Benjamin
D
espite being intimate with fungi for nigh on 50 years, I am a notoriously poor
taxonomist. Like many I was initially seduced by food, but then matured into toxicology, ecology and basic biology. My initial classification for fungi was based on the simple Russian system: “edible, poisonous, we don’t care.” Later in life, when art became a passion, I added a fourth category: “worth painting.” Living in the Pacific Northwest I became familiar with about 120 of the common mushrooms and adept identifying the toxic few. As a pathologist, pattern recognition was the stock-in-trade, but I limited myself to
human disease, rather than consuming limited neuronal storage space with fungi. I am embarrassed about not being au courant with the thousands of different fungal species or their most current monikers, so I rely on others for assistance. Ten, I thought, why not try one of the new smartphone apps? Being an early adopter of computers
I attempted writing a mushroom identification program while cutting my eyeteeth on Apple Basic in the 1970s. I discovered that dichotomous keys do not work as well for mushrooms as they do for plants, so gave up in disgust. Finally, synoptic keys became available, which are considerably better. One merely had to enter as many details of a mushroom as possible and the key would propose possible matches which
one could research further. One of the best of these (MycoMatch) was written for the Pacific Northwest by Alan Gibson. An offshoot of this are the keys and pictorial keys managed by Danny Miller. As good as these are, few of us carry computers into the woods, so they are limited to when we return home, tired and wet, with baskets of edibles begging to be processed. Moreover, the initial versions were unable to keep up with technology changes, limiting widespread adoption. Along came smartphones, soon
accompanied by a panoply of identification apps — plants, birds, insects, rocks, bugs, wine and mushrooms. Te granddaddy of all, adopted by every prospective biologist, is iNaturalist. My phone is dotted with
Winter 2022 FUNGI Volume 15:1 5
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