Players of a popular nature conservation gaming app, QuestaGame, will participate in the largest-ever Fungi Bioblitz this September 15 to October 15th.
September 15 2022
QuestaGame is a mobile app on iOS and Android that gets players outdoors to discover, map and ultimately help protect life on Earth. As part of the game, players take a photo of a wild organism, submit it, and the app will return an expert identification, along with the score.
The wildlife data it collects, meanwhile, is shared with national and global biodiversity databases for scientific research and conservation. While QuestaGame is less known in the American market, it’s played around the world and is especially popular among school kids and their families.
“It’s a bit like Pokemon GO meets David Attenborough,” says QuestaGame player Dr. Lisa Ryan, who runs an environmental education program.
Starting September 15th, QuestaGame players in North America will turn their attention from plants and animals to fungi, as part of the Great North American Fungi Quest. The Fungi Quest is designed to develop a better understanding of mushrooms, molds, yeasts, toadstools and more across all 23 countries of North America (including Central American and Caribbean countries).
“Our goal is 50,000 observations in one month,” says Robert Courteau, founder of ThinkFungi.org, which has organised the event. “Fungi serve an invaluable role in our ecosystem. They provide humans and a huge variety of insects and animals with top notch nutrition, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much we don’t know.”
Which is what makes the QuestaGame app - and the Fungi Quest - so compelling to students, parents and teachers alike.
“The students love to compete against their teacher, other classes and across the world,” says Todd Rogers, a grade three teacher at Ferny Grove State School.
"The competition has driven the kids to really pay attention to what's around them,” says a parent who plays QuestaGame under the name “Batgrrrl” and whose child plays the app as part of their school curriculum. “Their ability to spot things has blown me away, and they've started referring to a few of the commonly encountered critters by their scientific names."
In fact, according to Courteau, there’s a good chance a sharp-eyed QuestaGamer will spot a mushroom species that’s yet to be scientifically described. “We only know around 150,000 out of an estimated three million species of fungi.”
Finding a scientifically undescribed species is a common occurrence on QuestaGame, happening every 3-4 days. Recently an 11-year-old QuestaGame player became a co-author of a scientific paper for a rare grasshopper he found.
But even if a QuestaGamer doesn’t find a new fungi species, there will be plenty of prizes and kudos to go around for the Fungi Quest.
The app is free to play. If you’re in North America, just download the QuestaGame app and upload your wild fungi photos during the competition period. They will automatically count toward the quest.
What’s more, QuestaGame players will be able to export their collection to a new game, Guardians of Earth, scheduled to come out early next year. For more information, visit GuardiansofEarth.io.
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For more info, head over to https://questagame.com/north-american-fungi-quest or https://thinkfungi.org/fungiquest/, or contact gosia@earthguardians.life