Mushroom maps · prediction
Chanterelle map
Kanttarelli, also written kantarelli, is the chanterelle (Cantharellus cibarius). Its official Finnish name is keltavahvero. It grows with birch and other broadleaf trees on rich ground, and the same spot often produces year after year. That makes it the species whose spots are most worth recording carefully.
The map does not claim mushrooms are growing here right now. It colors, across the whole country, the forest stands where the chanterelle thrives, in other words where it is worth walking. The weather decides the harvest, and the app now says so: Painota sään ja kauden mukaan dims the layer where the species is out of season or where the rain has not come. The color still means terrain, not a crop.
What kind of forest the chanterelle seeks
- Trees
- Light-filled birch stands and mixed forests are its terrain. Pure broadleaf forest is not required, as long as some broadleaf is in the mix.
- Site type
- Lehto (herb-rich forest) and lehtomainen kangas (rich heath forest) are best, and tuore kangas (mesic heath forest) will do. On dry heath the prediction drops to nearly zero.
- Ground
- Kangasmaa (mineral-soil forest). It can still grow in a korpi (spruce mire), and on a räme (pine bog) practically never.
- Stand age
- Trees older than 45 years. There is no upper limit: old birch edges stay good for decades.
- Season
- July to September, and in a good year from Midsummer well into autumn.
- Northern limit
- The prediction fades quickly north of latitude 62.5, and in Lapland it is a fraction of the southern level.
The bars say whether a species is worth looking for now in the southern, central or northern part of the country. The division is the Finnish Meteorological Institute's. How the season and the weather are worked out
How to read it
Look for old birch edges: forest road verges, the broadleaf fringe of a clearcut, groups of birch among spruce. When you find one, mark the spot. Next year it will probably be there again.
Identification and cooking notes: kanttarelli (keltavahvero) at Martat (in Finnish).
What the prediction is computed from
The base is the multi-source national forest inventory map data (MVMI 2023) from Natural Resources Institute Finland: tree species shares, site fertility, mire type, stand age, volume and canopy cover in 16-meter cells across the whole country. Each row above is one factor in the model, and the factors are multiplied together, so one clearly wrong factor is enough to zero out a cell. Toward the north the prediction is damped according to observation counts from GBIF and Laji.fi, so that sparse recording in the north does not read as the species being absent. More: the mushroom maps and their limits.