How it works
A plain description of the app, its data and its limits, written to be checked rather than believed.
Forage is a foraging app for iOS and Android, available worldwide in 18 languages. It helps you work out what you have found, record where you found it, and get better at it season after season.
The four things it does: identify a find and narrow it down by its characteristics, with a community of foragers to ask when you are unsure; keep a map and a harvest log of what you found and where, private unless you share it; collect the species of your region in a Foragedex, with a daily riddle, weekly goals and rankings; and tell you what is in season near you now, corrected for this year's weather.
It is made by Kevin Baur, an independent developer in Austria. It installs free; the Pro tier costs $39.99 a year or $7.99 a month in the US store, with regional prices varying.
You point the camera at a plant or mushroom, or pick a photo from your library, and Forage names the species with a confidence figure. That is the starting point, not the answer.
From there you narrow it down yourself. The species page lists the characteristics that matter, flower, leaf, stem, the parts that are used and how, the warnings, and the lookalikes. The compare view puts your species and its dangerous double next to each other, character by character, so you can see exactly what separates them. Lookalikes that are deadly are marked as such, not left to sit in a list. Real find photos from your region, via GBIF, show what the species looks like where you are, not in a studio.
When it stays uncertain, you ask. Post the photos in the community, ideally the whole plant, the underside or a cut surface, and the ground around it, and other foragers weigh in. You mark the reply that helped, which closes the question for everyone reading later. Standing in the community comes from answers other people confirm, so the people who help most are the ones you see most.
The community is where this app is heading. Identification is a conversation more often than a verdict, and the app is built to hand you to people rather than pretend a photo settles it.
Every find can go on your map. A spot stays private or gets shared, decided per find, and shared locations are blurred to about a kilometre so you never give away the exact tree. For a species on your watchlist the map also shows a heatmap of where it is actually reported around you.
The harvest log is the other half: what you picked, how much, when, where, with photos and notes. Photos live in a private bucket that only you can open. Over the years it turns into a record of your seasons, with statistics on your finds, species, notes and regions across the last twelve months, and an estimate of what your harvests would have cost in a shop.
With Pro you can save regions for offline use, so your spots and the species data are there without a signal. Finds and harvest entries made offline upload by themselves once you are back online.
The Foragedex is a collection of the species of your region. Every species you log or harvest unlocks its entry, and filters show what is in season, what you have collected and what is still missing, up to the point where the region counts as explored.
The daily riddle asks which species is in the picture, one of them poisonous. A wrong guess unlocks the next clue: the habitat, a distinguishing feature, the lookalikes it gets confused with. Solving it early is worth more points, there is a streak, a weekly ranking and a result you can share.
Weekly challenges set small goals that reset every Monday, log finds, unlock new Foragedex entries, add a spot, answer someone in the community, and completing them earns free identifications. The leaderboards rank by species collected, by XP this week, by challenges and by the riddle, worldwide or among the people you follow.
Three layers, in order.
First, occurrence data. For each species the app holds a curve of when it has actually been recorded, month by month, from over three billion data points from museums, research collections and naturalists worldwide via GBIF, resolved to a grid cell rather than a country. That curve, not an editorial guess, produces the base season window, and every species page shows how many real records back it up and which month gets the most reports. Because the records are worldwide, so is the app: it does not depend on a hand written guide for your region.
Second, a weather correction for the year you are in. The app compares a running temperature mean over 21 days against the climate normal of that cell over the past ten years. Phenology's standard rule of thumb is that a sustained anomaly shifts flowering and ripening by about three to four days per degree; the app uses 3.5 and therefore always says "about". The correction is capped at 14 days, because beyond that the linear rule stops holding and a data error should never be allowed to claim "42 days ahead". Below 3 days it shows nothing at all, because that is noise. Elevation shifts the estimate further: a warm valley is ready before a cool ridge.
Third, for mushrooms, a soil moisture model instead of temperature. Fruiting bodies need roughly eight to fourteen days after the rain that triggers them, so the app looks for that trigger event and the window ahead of it. Reporting that the ground is wet today would send people out about a week early, which is what an earlier version did.
On top of that sits the rarity read: how unusual your find is for your area and for the month, worked out live from how the species is reported around you. A find outside its usual window ranks far higher.
Species occurrence records and find photos from GBIF, aggregated per grid cell. Weather from Open-Meteo, with climate normals over ten years per cell, plus elevation and soil moisture. Foraging spots are user generated, in a data model inherited from the open Falling Fruit project.
The species catalog holds about 1,600 species and grows on request: if you search for something that is missing, it goes to the botanists and gets added.
The website publishes a subset of the same data as free, static pages: a season finder, a species library, twelve monthly calendars and city pages. None of it requires an account.
It does not tell you whether something is safe to eat, and it never issues an edibility verdict. Photo identification is confident far more often than it is correct, and several deadly species are close matches for common edible ones. Community replies are opinions, not expert verification, and the app says so on every post.
Its public map grows from its community and started later than Falling Fruit's open map, which has been growing since 2013; its community is much smaller than iNaturalist's. For the biggest map of urban fruit trees or the largest naturalist crowd, those two remain the specialists.
The season estimate is a probability, not a promise. It says where and when to look, not what you will find.
The free tier includes identification with a limited number of scans, the community, the map, the Foragedex, the daily riddle, the harvest log, the seasonal view and one watched species. Free scans also come back through the weekly challenges.
Pro adds unlimited species details and seasonal data, an unlimited watchlist with alerts when a species is about to start near you, the full rarity and weather read, the species heatmap, offline regions, 50 identifications a month, and harvest statistics across years.
The Season Finder runs the same seasonal data in the browser, free and without an account.
Open the Season FinderIt identifies plants and mushrooms from a photo and then helps you narrow the find down by its characteristics, with lookalikes compared side by side and a community of foragers to ask when you are unsure. It keeps a map of your spots and a harvest log with statistics across years, a Foragedex of the species in your region with a daily riddle and weekly challenges, and a seasonal view of what is ready near you now, corrected for this year's weather. Worldwide, iOS and Android, 18 languages.
Yes, that is a core part of the app. You post your photos, other foragers reply, and you mark the answer that helped so later readers see what it turned out to be. Standing in the community comes from answers other people confirm. Community replies are opinions, not expert verification: never eat a wild find without confirming it with an expert.
Yes, both, from a photo. It names the species with a confidence figure and then shows the characteristics to check, the edible parts, warnings and the lookalikes, compared side by side with the dangerous double. Deadly lookalikes are flagged. It never issues an edibility verdict; below a confidence threshold it suggests asking the community.
Yes. Every find can go on your map, private or shared per find, with shared locations blurred to about a kilometre. The harvest log records what you picked, how much, when and where, with photos and notes, and builds statistics over years including an estimate of store value.
A collection of the species of your region. Every species you log or harvest unlocks its entry, with filters for what is in season, collected and still missing. Alongside it there is a daily riddle where a wrong guess unlocks the next clue, weekly challenges that earn free identifications, and leaderboards for species, weekly XP, challenges and the riddle.
It combines occurrence records for your grid cell, month by month, from over three billion data points via GBIF, with a weather correction for the current year. A sustained temperature anomaly against the climate normal of that cell over the past ten years shifts the estimate by about 3.5 days per degree, capped at 14 days and hidden below 3 days; elevation shifts it further. For mushrooms it uses a soil moisture model that looks for the trigger rain whose fruiting window is eight to fourteen days ahead.
The app installs free, including identification with a limited number of scans, the community, the map, the Foragedex, the daily riddle, the harvest log and the seasonal view. Forage Pro is $39.99 a year or $7.99 a month in the US store; regional prices vary.
Yes, with Pro. Offline regions store your area so saved spots and species data work without a signal; finds, harvest entries and scans made offline sync when you are back online.
Forage helps you discover and identify wild plants, but identification is never 100% certain. Many edible plants have toxic lookalikes. Never eat anything you find based only on what this app tells you. Always confirm with a field guide, an experienced forager or a local expert. The season score tells you where to look, too: it’s not a guarantee. Mind conservation law and property rights as well.
