Foray planner

The Foray page ranks places to look for what is in season. It also holds My areas, where members record land they may collect on.

Note Fee and collecting information here is an estimate. It comes from the type of land manager, not from the rules. Rules, permits, quantity limits and closures change by unit and by season. Check them with the land manager before you go.

How a place is scored

A place is a grid cell. Its score is the share of the cell's own finds that are of a species in season for the chosen time. Each species counts in proportion to how close its usual fruiting is to that day, and a species with a wide fruiting window counts for a little less.

• The score divides by the cell's own total, so a cell is not better for being visited more. It is effort-neutral, like the seasonal heatmap.
• A cell needs 3 or more finds by default. Fewer are not shown.
• Only cells that already have finds are scored, unless you blend in a model layer (below). A blank area is unsampled, not poor.
• Ranking pulls cells with few finds toward the average, as if each had 5 extra average finds, so a lucky 3-find cell does not beat a solid 40-find one.

Low, Fair, Good and Great

By default places are graded against each other: the strongest place on the map is at the top of the colour bar and the weakest at the bottom. Great is the top quarter of that range, then Good, Fair and Low. Even in a quiet month some place is Great.

Switch Scoring → Grade places to On a fixed scale to use fixed cut-offs instead: Great means about 38% or more of a place's finds are in-season species near their peak (after the small-sample adjustment). A quiet month then shows mostly Low.

The bar under the map shows the full colour scale, with a ▲ for the selected place. Open Why this grade? on a place to see the working: its season score, the small-sample adjustment, any model blend, its rank, and each species' finds, timing and weight.

Tune the score

Under Scoring you can change:

• Peak focus: how many days off its peak a species counts half (default 14). Lower favours species right at their peak.
• Time window: how many days either side of the date a find counts.
• Small-sample caution: the extra average finds each place is treated as having (0 takes every place at face value).
• Fewest finds: the minimum finds for a place to be scored.

Your settings go into the page address, so Copy link to this plan shares the same scoring. Reset goes back to the defaults.

Choose the time and place

• When is Now (the last 14 days around today) or a month (about two weeks either side of mid-month).
• Land cover keeps only finds on one land-cover class.
• Cell size sets the grid.

Three modes

The mode changes the defaults and which panels show. The score is the same.

Access switches

Unknown is never assumed free, public or allowed. Unless you keep unknown places, a switch removes them. A cell that several areas cover takes the most restrictive value of each.

Access data covers Colorado only. Where it is not loaded, the switches turn off and the page says so. The cell's centre point decides its access, so an edge cell can be labelled by land that covers only part of it.

The shortlist

The Foray leader mode adds a shortlist with a note field for each place. Notes stay in your browser. Export CSV, Copy text and Print all carry the site, coordinates, score, access, fee, collecting, number of finds, top species and notes. The score is rounded and the fee and collecting columns keep the estimated label.

The dashboard's Now fruiting card has a Plan a foray link. On the map, Heatmap → Foray score draws the same score as a grid.

What the labels mean

The planner never labels land allowed from an estimate. Allowed appears only for areas a member asserted.

My areas

Members open My areas (nav: Areas) to keep named sets of places they may collect. A set is private, or belongs to a club.

1. Create set, then Draw polygon on the map or Import GeoJSON (Polygon and MultiPolygon features; the import is all or nothing).
2. Name the area, set the fee and collecting values, and add notes. What you enter is owner-asserted. It is not verified.
3. For a club, a club owner or admin creates a club set and adds members by email. Owners and admins edit the set. Members can view it. A member can also edit an area they created.

Your areas draw on the map's Access layer as My areas and Club areas. Limits: 50 sets each, 500 areas per set, 5,000 vertices per area, 2 MB per import.

The Access layer on the map

Open Layers and expand Access. On a phone it is a section of the layer sheet. Tick Show access areas.

• Color by public access, fee status or collecting.
• Show only free, public, or collecting-allowed land (and likely allowed). Unknown areas are hidden by the filters.
• Sources toggles Public lands, My areas and Club areas. The last two need sign-in. Each shows a count.
• Estimated values draw with a dashed edge, and unknown areas draw grey. Clicking an area shows its details with the disclaimer.

Areas load from zoom 8. Roads and trails load from zoom 12, and only on a small view. Only Colorado is loaded. Outside it the layer says the data is not loaded, and no color does not mean no access.

Model layers

Open Model layers and pick a layer. It shades the map from low to high.

• Model blend averages the suitability maps of saved models for the species in season, weighted by how close each species is to its fruiting peak.
• Habitat match shades ground whose terrain, climate and cover sit in the range where the models' finds were made, using the variables that mattered most. It is not species-specific.

The planner picks models whose species is in season. Tick or untick models to change the mix (up to 6). Your own models and public ones are listed, with their AUC. Habitat match needs models trained after this feature shipped; older ones say re-run to add ranges.

Blend into grades

With a layer on, Blend into grades mixes the model into each place's grade. Places with many finds stay led by their finds; places with few lean on the model, up to the share you set (50% by default). The planner also searches the map view once for promising places with almost no finds and adds them as Predicted places, drawn with a dashed outline. Set the slider to 0 to only draw the layer.

Where few have looked

Pick a model layer, zoom in, and press Search this map view. The planner looks for places with 2 or fewer past finds where the layer is 50% or more, and ranks them by promise ÷ (1 + finds). Your access switches apply. Results show as lettered pins.

Places outside the range the models were trained on are left out, because a high value there is a guess. The list says how many were left out and which models it used. A place with few finds may simply have no habitat, so treat these as leads to check, not predictions.

Parking and walking in

The planner looks up the nearest parking (from OpenStreetMap), road and trailhead for the listed places and labels each one:

• Roadside: parking or a road within a quarter mile.
• Short walk: within a mile.
• Hike in: within 3 miles. Remote: nothing within 3 miles.

Under Filters, Walk in hides places beyond the walk you choose, and Accessible parking nearby keeps places with parking tagged wheelchair accessible (or with disabled spaces) within a quarter mile. Places without parking data are hidden while a walk filter is on, unless you keep unknown. Directions goes to the nearest parking when one is known, and the shortlist has a Walk column with the parking coordinates.

OpenStreetMap parking and accessibility tags are incomplete, so treat "Remote" and missing accessible parking as "not mapped", not "not there".

Not yet verified

The access database, the planner, model layers, the model blend, parking data and My areas are built and tested against fixtures. The access data has not been loaded and checked against live sources. Treat the first loaded results with caution, and report anything that looks wrong with Report a bug.