Data Methodology

The PDFs created provide mushroom foragers and identifiers a list of mushrooms that have been processed to match a mushroom's DNA sequencing with images of that mushroom.

There are different ways to access the data: by county or by project. Any user can freely download all PDFs for Alabama counties that have DNA sequencing data.

This can be very helpful for new and inexperienced foragers, especially having a list of mushrooms for the specific county they are in.

Project downloads can also be used to cover larger sets of mushrooms and broader geographic areas. Expert users have long had the ability to retrieve iNaturalist search results; this workflow makes that access available to everyone.

These PDFs can be used in areas without internet access as long as they have been downloaded ahead of time.

The PDFs are updated periodically to reflect new data. Some files can become large, so they may be packaged in ZIP files and broken into multiple PDFs as needed.