Celebrating Two Decades of Mushroom Observer
Nathan Wilson
FUNGI — Special 20th Anniversary Feature
Twenty years ago, I launched a modest website with an ambitious premise: give mycologists — amateur and professional alike — a shared space to record observations, upload photographs, and collaborate on identifications. Tere was no guarantee anyone would show up. Two decades later, Mushroom Observer (MO) hosts over half a million user-submitted observations accompanied by nearly two million photographs spanning almost 20,000 species. What began as an open invitation to share discoveries has grown into one of the most
scientifically valuable citizen-science platforms in mycology. Te numbers are remarkable, but
the more interesting story is what our community has built around them: a platform that takes fungal data seriously in ways that general-purpose biodiversity tools cannot, and that has remained responsive to the needs of working mycologists throughout its twenty-year run.
A Community Worth Acknowledging
None of this exists without the people who showed up. Over two decades, thousands of contributors have logged observations, uploaded photographs,
argued about identifications, proposed new names, vouchered specimens, written species descriptions, and quietly kept the lights on in ways large and small. Te breadth of that community — spanning field naturalists, graduate students, professional taxonomists, software developers, and everyone in between — is what makes MO work. Tis anniversary is as much a celebration of them as it is of the platform itself. I want to be honest about the full arc
of those twenty years. Like any online community, MO has had its share of conflict, and there have been stretches where sustaining the platform with the attention it deserves was genuinely difficult. But starting around 2022, something shifted. Te pace of new development accelerated dramatically, an increasingly active group of developers began contributing code, and it became clear that the project had achieved something real: a community- supported platform that can sustain itself and keep improving. Tat resilience is not something I could have engineered from the top down. It emerged from the community itself. If you are interested in helping shape
what MO becomes next — whether as a developer, a data contributor, an identifier, or in some other capacity — we are open to collaborators of all kinds.
A Community Grows, Online and in the Field Te heart of Mushroom Observer has
The vouchering team at the 2025 NEMF Sam Ristich Foray in Ithaca, NY, where MO Field Slips were used to document over 1,000 sequenced collections and 457 tentative species. Photo: Mushroom Monday / Aubrey Carter © 2025, used with permission.
30 FUNGI Volume 19:2 Summer 2026
always been its community. Enthusiasts from around the world log observations, upload photographs, and collaborate on identifications through a system we designed to weigh expertise rather than simply aggregate votes. When an experienced community member proposes an identification and no substantive objection is raised, that
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