Does this app identify plants and mushrooms for me?

Many people wonder or expect that Gather will have some kind of plant/mushroom species image recognition capability, but at this time, we do not. There are a couple of reasons we have decided to leave this feature out of the app outlined below.

The Role of “ID” Apps

First off, we want to acknowledge that these apps are incredibly powerful and helpful. Our team members use these apps themselves to discover more species growing around them. For general ecological learning, they are great! However, when the context is foraging, more considerations are needed.

Will this identify plant/mushroom X for me?
I often hear people phrasing the use of these apps in the above way, and it’s important to state that no app, no matter how accurate, can identify wild species for you.

Instead, they offer suggestions as to what the unknown species you have photographed could be, and then you decide whether that is correct or not.

Consuming a species solely based on the identification offered by an app is not that much better than just eating a completely random plant, which directly violates the first rule of safe foraging, as outlined in Gather, which is “Never consume anything without being 100% confident of its identity!”

These apps are amazing for offering you initial suggestions for the identity of a species that you can then use your own identification skills for (important details are provided in Gather) to properly and positively ID the species. From there, Gather is the perfect resource to look up that species to see if it has interesting uses.

Further, we generally recommend against foraging a completely new species for you at the moment that you discover its identity. You’d have yet to learn more about its ecology, conservation status, edible parts, cautions, and more, and we recommend you know these things before gathering it!

This leads to the second point.

Different Apps, Different Angles
Identification apps are for the following situation: “I don’t know what this species is, I need help figuring that out.”

Gather is very different; it is used for: “I want to learn the edible/useful species around me, I need help figuring that out.”

The power of Gather is its ability to clearly answer this question for you, showing not only what grows near you, but also when they are available for foraging, and much more.

All of those considerations we mentioned in the previous section, like cautions, conservation, and lookalikes, are covered in Gather. We created it to be the ultimate learning toolkit for new and beginner foragers and believe you’ll find less of a need to use ID apps if your purpose for using them is related to foraging!

The Landscape of ID Apps

As of writing this article, there are several dozen of these apps available on mobile app stores. Even some smartphones, like Apple and Android, have some of this capability built directly into the phones!

(We recommend using the app, “iNaturalist”. It is free, powerful, and has by far the best community compared to the others.)

With all the other apps out there, we did not find it worth our effort to reinvent the wheel, so we have opted not to include this feature in Gather and instead to focus on creating powerful features built specifically for foraging, like our integrated foraging journal, lookalikes guide, tailored timing predictor, and much more.