The Identifier available here is unlike traditional species determination keys; based on just a few characters it will produce its best 'guesses' as to the species to which that collection should be referred. Each possible answer will have a probability associated with it; consulting with the appropriate species descriptions may also help make a final determination.
The 'guesses' are generated by a machine-learning algorithm that has been 'trained' to recognise species from our existing collections. We have found that using only a small number of characters works quite well and that microscopic characters seem to produce the most consistent picture; perhaps because macroscopic characters are more subjective. Indeed the only macroscopic character currently used is the number of lamellae.
For convenience you can also load data for an existing collection if you know it's "HJB ID". Once you've loaded a collection try varying its characters to see how the species determination changes. Further information is available on our testing page.
How to fill in the identifier's characters
The latitude can be entered as a number - negative for the southern hemisphere; positive for the northern - or with a trailing 'S' or 'N'. Similarly the longitude can be a negative number for the Western hemisphere (e.g. American collections) or positive for the Eastern (most of Europe and Asia). A trailing W or E is also accepted. The altitude should be entered as a number - the number of metres above sea level.After identification, the location used by the identifier will be shown below.
Please see our morphology page for information and tips on choosing the lamellae, spore and cheilocystidia characters
When you have filled in the characters, select an identifier from the list below and then click "Identify".
Classification results
The top 5 most likely species according to our species classifier are shown below. These are shown in order of likelihood with the probabilities giving an idea of the strength of the identifier's "belief" that the collection is a particular species. We urge you not to assume the top ranked species is definitely correct. Instead, click through to each species page, examine the species descriptions given there in conjunction with the probabilities here and ultimately draw your own conclusions.
Merging these results to top 3 (sub)sections:
And according to our separate section-only classifier, the top 3 most likely (sub)sections for your collection are