The differences in the amount of areas across countries is mainly to do with differences in the amount of suitable grassland. For instance, in countries where lots of grassland has been turned into cropland there are fewer areas. In countries where grassland is dominated by, for instance, pastures there will be more areas.
Thanks for your feedback; i've been thinking of adding a field guide on identification. Also good luck hunting!
I'm not sure where you're located, but for most places it's a bit early in the season. I'd expect that location to shoot up to high likelihood through Sept-Oct.
You're absolutely right, nobody should eat any mushroom if they are at all uncertain about its identity.
For now i've focused on where and when to look and steered clear of what to look for, partially due to liability concerns. So, right now, the map is mainly useful for people who already know what they are looking for (or are willing to do the research) rather than complete beginners. I may add a 'field guide' on identification with all the caveats in the near future though.
For liberty caps, yeah. There are some rare reports from other states in the US (mostly east coast) but I don't want to give people false hope by including those states in the map.
However, there are many other species of psilocybin-containing mushrooms in North America. You can check out the Shroomery for more info on species in your area [1]
Liberty caps - or Psilocybe semilanceata - are a psilocybin-containing mushroom that grow naturally in many parts of the world. There is a lot of information online about where and when to look for liberty caps, but I wanted to see if data could help answer this question and boost people's chances of being in the right place at the right time.
To summarise how the map works: first, I matched the dates and coordinates of historical liberty cap growth records with data on habitat (e.g. land cover, elevation, soil acidity) and weather (e.g. temperature, rainfall). Second, I used this dataset to train a model describing the conditions in which liberty caps are more or less likely to thrive (for the statistically-inclined: kernel density estimation with model selection by maximum likelihood cross-validation). Finally, this model is used to make live predictions of the likelihood of liberty cap growth across the world on any given day.
For now, the map is limited to parts of Europe and North America (PNW + east coast of Canada) where liberty caps are known to grow.
I used the following data:
- Weather: ERA5 by ECMWF (historical) [1], GFS by NCEP (forecast) [2]
- Land cover: Corine Land Cover by Copernicus (Europe) [3], Land Cover by NALCMS (North America) [4]
- Soil acidity: SoilGrids by ISRIC [5]
- Elevation: SRTM by CGIAR [6]
- Growth records: Psilocybe Semilanceata by NBNAtlas [7]
I'm no expert, but the UK implemented the EU's General Data Protection Regulation by passing the Data Protection Act 2018 [1] which will still be in place come 1 January 2021. There could be revised/new legislation in future though.