Final Remarks
Whilst doing this project we got to learn about the limitations and abilities of esri’s ArcGISPro Suitability Modeller, along with the limitations and assumptions of our own analysis. As we have previously mentioned in our Introduction these maps are not proven to be actual habitat areas but rather areas that our analysis has highlighted to be potential suitable habitat areas. These potential habitat areas are based on weights that we defined thats based on our opinions and assumptions on each criterions importance in finding each mushroom species. The importance values we placed are based on research we conducted through foraging guides and papers rather than our own actual knowledge or scientific knowledge of these mushrooms’ habitats.
Fungi species have very limited research done on them, a lack of available research will be a limitation to our analysis. Our research had to be based on foraging guides and blogs posted by frequent foragers – not saying these sources are incorrect, but limited scientific studies have been completed on mushroom habitats for different species. However any science-based papers that were available were used to help guide our research.
Originally, we wanted to cover the entirety of the province but due to the software available to us and computing speeds we had to reduce our study area significantly to the southern part of the province. In the future it would be interesting to identify areas for the entire province. Another future addition that would be interesting to include in this project is actual proven foraged areas for these mushroom species. Compiling a dataset of where each species has been foraged to ensure the validity of our suitable habitat locations and increase the usability of our maps. Along with completely eliminating suitable habitats that fall within “non forage-able” lands like clipping our suitability layer to the ” non forage-able” layer, to only see areas of interest that you can forage in.
After analyzing our maps, our suitability analyses for each species located habitats that are within the ranges we identified for suitable locations and our MCE helped us achieve our goal for this project.
The only suitability model that we feel could have included larger-area regions is the Late Fall Oyster Mushrooms, because while it included a large amount of locations the locations are one raster pixel size large – which is in fact 5km large – but for a visual aid, regions with larger areas and less choppy boundaries would be more appealing in this case. This is a similar case for the Morel mushrooms, the suitable locations are very choppy visually but the Morel mushrooms suitable locations show relatively large areas for the available habitats for these mushrooms. When compared to our Chanterelle mushroom suitable locations which have much more smoother boundaries and therefore are more aesthetically pleasing.
The choppy boundaries have one advantage: being clear indicators of how large a suitable location is off the map. One raster cell is equal to 5km in our analysis, these choppy boundaries allow us to see this. Whereas in our Chanterelle analysis it is harder to tell the scale of each suitable location highlighted in our map with a quick glance. We are unsure why there are these differences between our models; if it has to do with the rasters used or the projection. As a result, this can be considered a source of error in our analysis. Regardless both models show us expected areas and can still be considered to have helped us achieve our goal, nonetheless it would have been ideal to have uniformity across models.
Written by Amy Manuel & Isabela Hrehorsky