There are a huge range of different online and offline mushroom identification resources and sometimes it's difficult to know which is best. From our experience, your best bet is to know the Top 10 poisonous mushrooms and have a small, easily accessible hardcopy book when you are out and about searching for mushrooms. Lastly,  back this up with home studying via trusted resources on the web (you can join our free sample course here) and you are good to go. Here are our top 5 mushroom ways to safely identify mushrooms:

1. Artificial Intelligence

In recent years, there has been an explosion of AI-driven image upload sites. Whilst probably the easiest to use, they can have an issue with blurry or poorly framed pictures. Some of our favourites include:

• Svampe - easiest to access, cleanest user interface. A Danish site where you can upload mushroom images at the top of the page.
• Champignouf - has a website and an app (Adroid + iOS)
• Shroom.id - no website only an app (Android + iOS).

However, you need to be aware that these systems are not infallible, there has been a recent spate of poisonings due to apps misidentifying deadly mushrooms for edible ones¹.

2. Online Visual Guides 

You can make observations yourself about specific mushrooms and then compare your findings to a free online mushroom guide (see excerpt above). However, the main issue with this is it can prove a bit tricky as you will need to know a little beforehand, in regards to mushroom characteristics including: 

• Shape - cylindrical, conical, convex...
• Colour - brown (LBMs!), white, blue staining... 
• Smell - aniseed, musky, pungent...
• Taste and flavour -in our experience, some new mycologists fear even touching mushrooms, however, this is perfectly safe!

3. Hardcopy Books

Whilst having all the technology in the world is great when you are out in the woods with no wifi, it's not so great. So it's always good to have a hardcopy backup like a book, below is a quick list of our favourites.

• Mushrooms Paperback by Roger Phillips - a pretty big book, often touted as the best for UK mushroom foragers. The book contains lots of clear images however, it is very weighty with nearly 400 pages, this isn't the best book for a complete newb!
• Mushrooms: How to Identify and Gather Wild Mushrooms and Other Fungi by DK. A great starting point to get kids into the subject, full of colourful pictures, however again, quite weighty for the road.
• Local guide - there are a lot of smaller, regionally specific books which can be bought.

4. Spore print test

The spore print test is one of the most helpful tests for edible mushrooms and mushrooms in general. You cut the mushroom cap and place it gill-side down on a clear piece of paper. There will be a powdery impression of the gills formed on the paper. You can also put the mushroom in between two pieces of paper (called sandwiching) and leave for 4 to 8 hours. The result will be a colour impression of the spore pattern on the clear paper. The probable colours that you will find include; white, cream, yellow, purple, black, pink, and purple-brown. There will never be such colours as blue, green or red. With your results, you will have to compare to a guide that indicates which colour is for which mushroom.

5. Combine all of these by trying one of our courses...

On this website, our expert mycologists use videos and online learning sessions to teach a method of identification called differential diagnosis. This is a relatively new technique developed by Voytek Bereza our lead pharmacist/mycologist and is derived from how new doctors learn to differentiate between different medical conditions. 

Over our decade of experience, we have found the best way to start learning this process is to first learn which mushrooms are misidentified the most. You will quickly find in the medical literature² that the Death Cap (Amanita phalloides) causes the most poisoning worldwide and is ingested by misidentification with other species (mainly field mushrooms). 

For a no-obligation trial of our free course, just follow the link...

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References

¹Beware of deadly wild mushrooms: Portage County man survives poisoning, thanks to an experimental drug at UH

Published: Oct. 10, 2022 via https://www.cleveland.com/news/2022/10/beware-of-deadly-wild-mushrooms-portage-county-man-survives-poisoning-thanks-to-experimental-drug-at-uh.html

²Issue: BCMJ, vol. 61 , No. 1 , Published on: January February 2019 , Pages 20-24 Clinical Articles By: Maxwell Moor-Smith, BSc Raymond Li, BSc(Pharm), MSc Omar Ahmad, MD, FRCPC Accessed on 26 May 2020 via: https://www.bcmj.org/articles/worlds-most-poisonous-mushroom-amanita-phalloides-growing-bc