Crowdsourced Platform Logs Edible Plants Growing In Major Cities
Falling Fruit lists trees the produce food in US and Canadian urban hubs.
Care to go fruit picking in the city? You can check out Falling Fruit, a website that maps out and catalogs the urban trees with edible fruits, leaves and roots that you can find in your city.
The site was created by PhD student Ethan Welty and computer science professor Caleb Philips, both from University of Colorado. The site has in its list over half a million trees with edible products. To date the database includes 575 different types of edibles (mostly plant species) that are found in over 578,513 locations.
The website includes maps contributed by local foragers from the internet, as well as municipal tree inventories or databases of trees used by cities, universities and institutions.
The website is currently still a prototype and the map is open for anyone to edit. The entire database can also be downloaded with just a simple click.
The founders state on the website that some of the data may be slightly outdated or inaccurate, so it is still the responsibility of ‘foragers’ to identify plants and determine that they are edible.