Seasonality, lookalike pairs and regional field signals, free to reuse under CC BY 4.0. Credit World Mushroom Foraging (https://worldmushroomforaging.org). Every file is a count or a published guide field, never an exact location, a person or an unreviewed submission.
A map observation is not an identification. Never eat a wild mushroom based on this data. Nothing here says whether a mushroom is edible.
Mushroom seasonality by species and hemisphere
Records per calendar month for each catalogue mushroom, split by hemisphere. A month count is how many research-grade records fall in that month across all years, not a forecast. Hemisphere rows with fewer than 30 records, or species seen by fewer than 10 people, are left out.
Derived from iNaturalist research-grade observations (iNaturalist open data, AWS Open Data Program), snapshot 2026-08-27. Counts only: no record ids, observers or coordinates. The CC BY 4.0 licence covers this compilation. Underlying observations belong to iNaturalist and its observers under the licences they chose; credit iNaturalist and its observers when you reuse it.
Dangerous and harmless lookalikes for each guide, the field check that separates them, and whether the lookalike lists the species back. Severity words are the ones printed on each guide page and are not yet uniform across pairs, so read both pages of a pair. This is study material, not an edibility judgement.
The mushroom guides on World Mushroom Foraging with names, iNaturalist taxon ids, season and habitat notes, the printed safety warning, review status and page links. Edibility ratings are deliberately not part of this dataset.
Ten worldwide habitat regions used for regional seasonality and the 90-day field signal, with bounding boxes (west, south, east, north) and hemisphere.
For each of ten regions: how many reviewed public observations were found in the last 14 and 90 days, and which species are starting, likely or ending, counted by when each mushroom was found. Species with fewer than three recent records are left out. Live data, counts only.
A read-only Model Context Protocol server, open without a key, lives at https://worldmushroomforaging.org/mcp. Tools: search_species, get_species_guide (with lookalikes and the safety warning), seasonality, in_season_near and list_regions. Each answer carries the page to cite. It does not identify mushrooms from photos, return exact locations, or say whether a mushroom is edible. Details: tools and examples.
How to cite and what the licence covers
Cite as: World Mushroom Foraging, https://worldmushroomforaging.org/data, retrieved on the date you used it, with the page URL of any guide you quote. The CC BY 4.0 licence covers our compilation. Observation-derived counts come from research-grade iNaturalist records; the observations belong to iNaturalist and its observers under the licences they chose, so credit iNaturalist and its observers too. Guide text may be quoted with a link but not republished in full. Photos keep their own licences.