Mushroom identification is no easy task, even for experts.
There are hundreds of thousands of species of wild mushrooms. Some are edible, some can send you on a mystical journey, and some will try and kill you.
So how are we supposed to tell them all apart?
Experience, and careful practice, honed over many years, is the best way to really learn how to identify mushrooms. However, there are some reasonably helpful mushroom identification apps (and a couple awesome books!) that can lend a hand along the way.
Best Mushroom Identification Apps
Rogers Mushrooms App (iOS, Android)
The website is no longer available, however, the information is still available on the Roger’s Mushrooms App for IOS and Android.
The app features identification for over 1600 species with over 2600 high res pictures, all zoomable so you can get a closer look. Warning though, this app takes up a ton of space.
The app also has some other features, such as being able to pin your finds and foraging locations on a map, ability to filter mushrooms by visual appearance and some social features.
It is available for both IOS and Android. The Android app is the older version, which most people say is much better than the updated version anyways.
Roger’s Mushrooms App for Android
Roger’s Mushrooms App For iOS
Book of Mushrooms (Android)
The app only contains 254 of the most common species, and misses some of the big ones. But honestly, there are still a ton of different mushrooms on the app.
There are also over 1400 pictures, all taken from different angles to help with identification.
Other functionalities include a search, a section of helpful articles, and a mushroom calendar so that you can see what mushrooms are currently fruiting.
The app might not be the best thing since fried morels, but it’s free- so hard to complain!
Book of Mushrooms App on Android
Fungitron Mushroom Guide (Android)
The app also has an “Identification Mode” which allows you to filter mushrooms based on characteristics such as fungi type, cap shape, size and other physical and environmental identifiers.
This feature would be awesome if there were more mushrooms in the app, but with only 70, it’s not all that useful. Selecting too many identifiers will yield “no results pretty quick.
The fungitron app might be useful if you are mushroom hunting in a place that has no phone service- which is likely, but it really doesn’t hold any advantages over just using a good guidebook.
Again, the app is free, and the interface is friendly, so there is nothing wrong with giving it a try!
Fungitron App on Android
Mushrooms (Android)
It breaks down the species between “edible”, “in-edible” and “poisonous”, and you are able to search within each category for the species by Latin name.
However, there is no key or any other functionality, so it isn’t all that helpful as a tool to identify mushrooms, unless you scroll through each one individually, trying to match a find.
Also, there aren’t a ton of pictures, usually just one for each species, which unfortunately leaves a lot to the imagination.
The app is free, and useful if you just want to learn about tons of different mushroom species- overall it might be worth a try.
Mushrooms App (Kirill Sidorov)
Skip the App?
To be honest, even though mushroom apps are kind of cool, they may not be all that important. Although some of them serve functionality, it’s usually quite limited. For example, sure some mushroom apps allow you to pinpoint your finds with GPS on a map- but you’re probably better off just using a separate GPS app and your camera. Most of them are just downloads of information and pictures on your phone, which can usually be accomplished better with a book- and you don’t have to worry about running out of battery in the forest!Audubon Mushrooms Guidebook
With over 750 full color, high quality pictures, and 700 species covered in depth, the National Audubon Society’s Field Guide to Mushrooms is a must have for any mushroom hunter.
Although it is incredibly comprehensive, it’s still small enough to easily carry with you on your next foraging adventure.
The book is organized with a visual key, which makes it easy to try and narrow down the mushrooms you’re actually looking at on the forest floor.
You could consider the above apps as essentially a watered-down version of this guide, with some added functionality you’ll likely never use. For most people, the book is a better option.
The book is organized with a visual key, which makes it easy to try and narrow down the mushrooms you are actually looking at on the forest floor.
You could consider the apps above as essentially a watered-down version of this guide, with some added functionality you’ll likely never use. For most people, the book is a better option.
Mushrooms Demystified
Although this compendium is large and heavy as a brick (bring an extra backpack!) it’s packed full of incredibly useful information, and is definitely worth its weight in morels. But Mushrooms Demystified by David Aurora is more than just a guidebook. It contains comprehensive information on over 2000 species, tons of helpful pictures, and is organized as a dichotomous key– meaning it’s actually useful for identifying mushrooms in ways other than simply comparing pictures. There’s an incredible amount of information in this book- and if you were able to digest it all, you’d have a pretty good handle on not only identifying mushrooms, but mycology in general.
