Forage with the Falling Fruit Map

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Photo by Getty Images/Clarkandcompany
Urban foraging is easier with Falling Fruit, a collaborative mapping interface that lets users flag edible plants.

Around the world, millions of plants produce food that spoils because no one knows to collect it. Now, a Colorado-based nonprofit named Falling Fruit is striving to connect would-be foragers with this untapped resource. With a world map that uses a geographic information system (GIS), Falling Fruit enables users to explore, edit, and record the location of wild food anywhere in the world for others to find and enjoy. New foraging locations are added daily, making it easier to find anything from berry bushes and fruit trees to edible fungi and even food-filled urban dumpsters.

In this way, Falling Fruit is making it easier than ever to take advantage of the underappreciated food that grows in urban spaces. By streamlining the process of recording and finding foraging sites on the interactive map, Falling Fruit creates deeper connections between people, their neighborhoods, and local food. Though this map isn’t the first to track urban food harvests, it’s the most comprehensive one available and contains more than 1 million data points with close to 2,000 varieties of edibles from around the world.

Because Falling Fruit is designed to be a community resource, the map is built on public data and is open for anyone to edit. Falling Fruit is a volunteer-run nonprofit, and the organizers rely largely on donations to operate. You can view the map online, add your own mark, make a donation, or download parts of the database directly to take with you on the go at Falling Fruit. To learn more about the map or gain access to the data for a project, you can contact the creators at Feedback@FallingFruit.com.

  • Published on Sep 19, 2017
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