Woodlands Mycology is a personal field journal documenting mushroom finds in The Woodlands, TX area. This is a hobby project — not a scientific resource — built and maintained as a way to log sightings, practice identification, and tinker with web development.
Each entry in the journal represents a mushroom encountered on walks around the area. When a new find is added, it’s photographed and run through an AI-assisted identification process as a first-pass starting point. From there it’s cross-referenced against a couple of reference books to refine the identification. The site logs the common name, Latin name, a description, GPS coordinates (pulled automatically from photo EXIF data), and photos.
The map view lets you see where each find was located, and the blog section gives a closer look at each one with the full photo gallery and identification notes.
The site is built with Django (Python) and hosted on PythonAnywhere. Photos are stored via Django’s media file handling. The front end uses Bootstrap 4. Mushroom identification uses the Anthropic Claude API to analyze uploaded photos and suggest a species, Latin name, and key identifying features. Source code is on GitHub.
When it comes to verification, I rely on two field guides: