Like many mushroom harvesters, I got interested in foraging for fungi during the COVID-19 pandemic.
I had been preparing for a summer of field work studying foraged desert plants in a remote part of Australia when the pandemic hit, and my travel plans were abruptly frozen. It was March, right before morel mushrooms emerge in central Pennsylvania.
I wasn’t doing a lot other than going on long hikes and taking classes remotely at Penn State for my doctoral degree in ecology and anthropology. One of the classes was an agroforestry class with Eric Burkhart. We studied how agriculture and forests benefit people and the environment.
These two things eventually led to a yearslong project on mushroom harvesting in our region.
Why people forage
Foragers have been harvesting wild mushrooms in what is now Pennsylvania and the rest of the US mid-Atlantic region for generations, but the extent and specifics of the practice in the region had not been formally studied.
In 2021, Burkhart and I decided that we wanted to better understand the variety of wild mushroom species that Pennsylvania harvesters collect and what they use them for.
We conducted a series of surveys in 2022 and 2023 that revealed a wide variety of fungi are foraged in the region—though morels, chicken of the woods, and chanterelles are most common. We also learned that harvesters use the mushrooms primarily for food and medicinal purposes, and that foragers create communities that share knowledge. These community-based projects often use social media tools as a way for mushroom harvesters to share pictures, notes, and even the results of DNA sequences.
Our findings were published in the journal Economic Botany in October 2025.
160 species
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