Frequently asked
The questions people actually send us, answered at the length the answer needs rather than the length that sounds confident.
Am I allowed to pick here?
We cannot answer that yet, and we would rather say so than guess.
Foraging rights in Europe differ not only by country but by landowner and by protected status. Italy licenses foraging region by region, often with a permit and a daily limit. In England it depends on whether the land is access land and on the owner's permission, and some species are protected outright. Nature reserves have their own rules nearly everywhere.
A legality layer is the next thing we are building. Until it exists, check the rules for the specific place you are going to, and treat nothing on this site as permission.
Is this a map of mushroom spots?
No, and the difference is the point. A map of finds answers «where», from other people's pins. We answer «when»: the forecast comes from weather, season and the phase of the flush, and it changes every day. We hold no crowd-sourced map of spots and do not pretend otherwise.
How accurate is it?
Measured, and published in full. Against independent field records the model ranks the day of a real find above a random day in the same place 0.610 of the time, where 0.5 is a coin toss. For the month rather than the week the figure is 0.847.
We set ourselves 0.750 as the bar before running the test, and the weekly figure does not reach it. We publish that rather than rounding it into «61% accurate», which would be a different claim and a false one.
The index is high but I found nothing. Why?
The index reads weather and season — things that are the same for tens of kilometres around. It does not know your particular wood, and the wood is where the mushroom grows.
The usual reasons: the wrong trees, and no weather makes up for the wrong stand; a wood felled recently or still young, where the mycelium needs years; a spot that is simply picked out, as anywhere near a car park is by Sunday; or a flush that came and went, and slugs and larvae got there before you. None of these is visible to the model.
What does the «demo data» badge mean?
That the region is not yet on live weather and the forecast is running on climate normals instead. It is the real state of the service rather than decoration, and it disappears by itself when the region moves to live data. We would rather show the badge than quietly present a modelled number as an observed one.
How often does it update?
The scheduler recomputes every six hours from the past week's weather, and pages refresh with it, at least hourly.
Does it tell me whether something is safe to eat?
No, and there is no setting that changes this. We name species, seasons and dangerous lookalikes. We do not identify what is in your hand and we never confirm edibility. Where you are not certain, the answer is to leave it.
Which areas are covered?
The forecast currently runs across Russia and Belarus, with European regions being added — the region list on the forecast page is generated from the database, so it is always the real current answer rather than a number typed into a page.
Coverage is not uniform, and the pages say so where it matters: the high-resolution terrain layer exists for one region so far, and every other regional page states that plainly instead of hiding it.