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Technology & Mushroom Hunting - GIS/GPS?


upsinker

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Do any of you use GIS for scouting out potential new hunting grounds? I've been looking at UCONN's GIS maps and they offer a wealth of local information (although it's not easy to work through it all). It also occurs to me that a mushroom hunter with a good understanding of GIS and a few good data sets could map tons of relevant information (ground cover types related to specific mushrooms, soil PH, bedrock composition, burn sites, etc etc).

My follow up question is do any of you use GPS to record your good spots? Do you use databases to log foray results? I know these techniques have become pretty popular in other outdoors hobbies like fishing and bird watching but I haven't heard much mention of them in the mushroom world - curious if any of you dabble with all this great new technology?

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Ok I am a luddite. live with it. I dont do the GPS thing and I never will. ever. I can generally find my way home. With mushroom hunting there are some issues that generally make GPS pointless, at least where I live...

The first issue to address is why are you out there picking mushrooms anyway? For many the point of the game is to get out into the woods and get a bit of exercise and discover new things. It seems to me that if you get out of the car, turn on a machine, and start rushing to known trees you are pretty much defeating the point of being there in the first place. You won't ever see that owl silently following you or those salamanders hiding in the leaves.

The second issue has more to do with where you hunt mushrooms. Where I live there is public land and private land (and public land where picking is prohibited). What happens is folks gravitate to the public lands because there is access. We have thousands of acres of public land but only some of it provides good picking so I mostly frequent a few public forests and a couple of private ones unless I have some good reason to look elsewhere. It turns out that after a half dozen trips to a forest I start to recognize specific trees, rocks and logs. Ya there were lobster mushrooms just past that log over there. I really dont need a GPS for that. For the places I dont hunt often I suppose a GPS might be useful but the truth is that I dont hunt there often because I dont find all that much there. I think I am better off wandering and searching in these types of places hoping to find new places which would get that particular forest higher up on my list of preferred spots. If I just walk right to that spot where I found a few boletes 2 years ago I will never learn that forest.

I would get excited about a technology that would let me detect bears from a mile away but I dont get even a bit interested in something that will let me know if I am within 3 feet of some place I was a year ago. I sort of put research tools into the same category. There isnt a lot of point divining likely spots and then discovering you cant pick there. If I am going to be limited in where I pick to public lands within a reasonable driving distance I dont really need the research, I will just go take a walk. Getting fancy with the way you record your finds is a different issue and I suppose technology can help a bit with that but even there it is tough to beat a Bic pen and a 3 ring binder.

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Ok I am a luddite. live with it. I dont do the GPS thing and I never will. ever. I can generally find my way home. With mushroom hunting there are some issues that generally make GPS pointless, at least where I live...

The first issue to address is why are you out there picking mushrooms anyway? For many the point of the game is to get out into the woods and get a bit of exercise and discover new things. It seems to me that if you get out of the car, turn on a machine, and start rushing to known trees you are pretty much defeating the point of being there in the first place. You won't ever see that owl silently following you or those salamanders hiding in the leaves.

The second issue has more to do with where you hunt mushrooms. Where I live there is public land and private land (and public land where picking is prohibited). What happens is folks gravitate to the public lands because there is access. We have thousands of acres of public land but only some of it provides good picking so I mostly frequent a few public forests and a couple of private ones unless I have some good reason to look elsewhere. It turns out that after a half dozen trips to a forest I start to recognize specific trees, rocks and logs. Ya there were lobster mushrooms just past that log over there. I really dont need a GPS for that. For the places I dont hunt often I suppose a GPS might be useful but the truth is that I dont hunt there often because I dont find all that much there. I think I am better off wandering and searching in these types of places hoping to find new places which would get that particular forest higher up on my list of preferred spots. If I just walk right to that spot where I found a few boletes 2 years ago I will never learn that forest.

I would get excited about a technology that would let me detect bears from a mile away but I dont get even a bit interested in something that will let me know if I am within 3 feet of some place I was a year ago. I sort of put research tools into the same category. There isnt a lot of point divining likely spots and then discovering you cant pick there. If I am going to be limited in where I pick to public lands within a reasonable driving distance I dont really need the research, I will just go take a walk. Getting fancy with the way you record your finds is a different issue and I suppose technology can help a bit with that but even there it is tough to beat a Bic pen and a 3 ring binder.

I can respect wanting to preserve what you consider the purity in what you do and how you do it.

I didn't expect to touch a nerve with this post but I guess it's a subject on which people have strong opinions. That said I want to address your questions/assertions for the sake of providing a different point of view.

First of all when it comes to points one and two I agree with you.

I'm a weekend warrior, I have very limited time to spend in the woods - but I think about it all the time. For me the mushroom hunt starts way before I get to the woods with the planning stage - then I get to the woods and man do I savor it - and then finally if I put together a good plan I can hopefully extend the experience a while longer by cooking some good food and trying out some new recipes. I haven't been mushroom hunting for long (well, I took a 20 year break) but this has been my approach to fishing for a long time and the pre & post game are a big part of the fun. All this cool technology has (in my mind) a lot more application in the pre and post part of the experience than during the actual foray. I've got about five months before there's anything much to pick around here and during that time I'm going to spend a lot of time looking over old aerial photography, archival land surveys and firefighter websites looking for new areas to explore come spring. I doubt I'll get a GPS but I'd like one to play around with, and I don't maintian a database either (just a notebook) but with 5 months ahead of me you never know. It's all about having fun and layering on more details to your hobby, not about becoming the most efficient mushroom hunting robot out there. Hope you can understand my perspective.

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Mushrooms --even mycorrhizal types-- often don't fruit in the exact same spots form one year to the next. Morel patches seem to come and go, and then maybe come back again (the live-forest types, that is). FB's suggextion about marking spots where predictably good elms are found seems useful. Also, there are some exceptions to the "move around" hypothesis. Chanterelles, for instance, seem to occupy the same exact spots... with some annual weather/moisture related variations. I generally remember where my best spots are. The GPS/fishing idea sounds good. Fish that tend to school up in deeper water away from the shoreline --like walleyes-- can take time to locate.

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I've used GPS to mark truffle spots in the very dense and thick woods of Oregon. Also since I was relatively new there I didn't always know my way around so it was helpful to find my way back to places I'd only been once. Mostly just getting the general area though and not so much used in the woods.

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I'm the opposite of DufferinShroomer; I like technology and databases. As soon as I heard about GPS, I planned to record mushroom locations. However, I'm also a cheapskate; so I waited until GPS units sold for under $100 before I bought one, late in 2008. I use the GPS to record trails as well as mushroom locations. A lot of these trails are rarely used and not recorded in any literature that I'm aware of. Some of them I brushed out myself. I plot the trails and mushroom locations on Google Earth, which provides a lot of useful information about the surroundings. It is easy to distinguish conifer from deciduous forests and mature trees from young ones, which really helps to point you in the right direction when searching for new mushroom locations.

The mushroom locations go into a database that records date and quantity of mushrooms found. This is valuable for determining when to return to each spot, as well as where to go. Most of the places I find mushrooms are off-trail, and some would be impossible to find again without a GPS. I also enjoy the scientific aspects of analyzing the database. I want to know which mushrooms appear repeatedly in the same spots and in what quantities. Of course, I only do this for the best and scarcest of the edible mushrooms. I don't bother recording Chanterelles, which are so abundant that I collect enough as "bycatch". Morels are the main entries in the database, along with Hedgehogs, both of which are pretty scarce near Vancouver, BC.

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Duff, the database contains the following: Original GPS waypoint number, current waypoint ID, Google Earth ID, date found, elevation, latitude, longitude, GPS accuracy for that waypoint, general area where found, quantity of mushrooms found at location, comments, and seasonal rank (1 to 7, covering a seasonal range from very early to very late). The last field is determined at the end of the mushroom season by comparing the finding dates.

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I use a Garmin GPSmap76CSx which has a receiver powerful enough to get readings through leaf covered trees. I use it when exploring a new location so that I do not get lost. After I get familiar with the trails at a particular site I like to explore the area not covered by trails. If I already have the trails plotted I will go off trail and head to an apposite point on an existing trail. It enables me to explore areas not covered by trails as I head back to where I started from.

Since I have moved to Whitinsville, MA, Douglas State Forest is only about 10 miles away. It contains 4,640 acres, plenty of room to get lost in. I plan start exploring this site come spring. The GPS will make it easier to explore this site in a systematic manner.

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  • 4 months later...

I am wanting to spend some of my tax return on a GPS unit. I am a total GPS noobie and don't know what unit would be the best for me. I want something that will read through dense leaved trees deep in forests, but also don't want to spend more than a few hundred greenbacks. Recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you and happy hunting,

Blake

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I'm planning on using the google maps app on my iphone to drop pins where I find good patches ... and to find my way out if necessary. Would be curious to know if anyone else has done this, with any degree of success.

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Blake, I bought the cheapest Garmin unit I could find, the eTrex H. The H stands for high sensitivity, and it works quite well in dense woods with leaf cover. This unit has no mapping function; but for finding mushroom locations, I don't think a map is necessary. I have no problem going back to locations that I marked previously. This model has a list price of $100; you'll probably have to pay twice that to get a unit that will display maps. And maps cost extra, of course.

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Whats up yall? I love using my gps for all sorts of different things. I can track my whole trail. Waypoints along said trail. I do a lot of king picking along the Washington and Oregon coast it works perfect for tallying how far off the water I am there is a line that is more productive than others ime. Also you can use it more for not walking in the same exact area as before. Sometimes you gotta think outside the box!!!!

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My first GPS was a very inexpensive Garmin that would not work well with a overhead canopy. My second GPS is DeLorme pn40 witch works well in thick woods. I down load maps and navigation charts. I mark the spots I where I find mushrooms or go to where I dropped my crab traps. I all so use mine for Ggeocaching.

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My first GPS was a very inexpensive Garmin that would not work well with a overhead canopy. My second GPS is DeLorme pn40 witch works well in thick woods. I down load maps and navigation charts. I mark the spots I where I find mushrooms or go to where I dropped my crab traps. I all so use mine for Ggeocaching.

I don't own a GPS but I found a cache last year while I was looking for mushrooms. Probably not a good idea to open random ammo boxes you find in the woods but I did before I really thought about it.

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