General terms of use

1. Purpose of the site

The site freely publishes statistical estimates of the weather and environmental conditions favourable to the growth of certain mushrooms, as well as general information content. It is an information service, with no aim of providing advice, mycological, medical or safety expertise.

2. Nature of the information published

• Scores are produced automatically by a model from forecasts and open data, which are themselves liable to errors. They may be wrong, incomplete, late or unavailable. A high score guarantees neither the presence of mushrooms, nor their edibility, nor the safety of a place.
• Species pages, photographs and descriptions are provided as general illustration. They do not allow a specimen to be identified and in no way replace examination by a pharmacist or a competent mycologist.
• Forecasts are indicative: they rest on weather models and averages per municipality, not on observations in the field.
• Indications of places (municipalities, forests, coordinates) are neither an authorisation of access nor information on the status of the land.

3. User's responsibility

The user is solely responsible for:

• the identification, picking, preparation and consumption of any mushroom, and the consequences for their own health and that of third parties;
• respecting private property, local regulations (prefectoral or municipal orders limiting or banning picking, maximum quantities, protected areas, state forests) and hunting rules;
• their safety when moving around in the natural environment (terrain, weather, navigation, hunting, equipment).

4. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the publisher cannot be held liable for any damage, direct or indirect, material or bodily, resulting from the use of or inability to use the site, or from decisions taken on the basis of the information published, in particular in the event of poisoning, accident, a fruitless trip, breach of a regulation or infringement of another person's property. The site is provided “as is”, with no guarantee of accuracy, completeness, availability or fitness for a particular purpose. The publisher may modify, suspend or stop all or part of the service at any time, without notice.

Links to third-party services (Google Maps, Apple Maps, data sources, Wikimedia Commons) are provided for convenience; the publisher is not responsible for their content or operation.

5. Observation reports

The “I found some” and “Found nothing” reports are made without an account and serve only to improve and check the model. They are not verified and are not published individually. It is forbidden to send false or automated reports. By sending a report, you grant the publisher, free of charge, the right to use it to improve and validate the model.

6. Intellectual property

The structure of the site, its texts, its graphic identity, its code and the database of scores are the property of the publisher and protected by the French Intellectual Property Code (Code de la propriété intellectuelle), including articles L.341-1 et seq. relating to database producers. The following are prohibited without written authorisation: the extraction or reuse of all or a substantial part of the database, including by repeated extractions of non-substantial parts; automated collection (scraping) of the pages, the map or the API; reproduction of the site or its score database in another service.

Occasional quotation of a score or a page, with a link to the site, is permitted. The source data and photographs remain subject to their own licences, indicated on the Method & sources page and under each image. Indexing by search engines and conversational assistants is permitted.

7. Licences of third-party sources

Sporalo relies on third-party open data (Open-Meteo, ECMWF, JRC, ESA WorldCover, IGN, ISRIC, OpenLandMap, Copernicus, API Géo, national statistical and mapping institutes, OpenStreetMap, Wikimedia Commons), used under their respective licences (CC BY 4.0, CC BY-SA 4.0, Licence Ouverte 2.0, Open Government Licence, dl-de/by-2-0, ODbL, etc.), listed with their attributions on the Method & sources page. The publisher's rights described in article 6 relate to its own contribution (model, selection, calculation and presentation of the scores), without restricting the rights that these licences grant over the source data themselves. If you reuse a third-party source, contact its producer directly and comply with its licence.

8. Personal data

Apart from reports, e-mail alerts, the contact form and technical security logs, the site collects no personal data. E-mail alerts are subject to their own rules (consent, one-click unsubscribe). The details are in the legal notice.

9. Contact

See the legal notice.

10. Applicable law

These terms may be modified; the version in force is the one published on this page. They are governed by French law. Any dispute falls, failing an amicable agreement, under the competent French courts. If a clause were held to be unenforceable, the others would remain in force.