Mushroom Safety Explorer

What is this? This dataset comes from the Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Mushrooms and covers 8,124 samples from 23 species in the Agaricus and Lepiota family. Each sample has 22 physical characteristics — cap shape, odor, gill color, habitat, and more — and is labelled either edible or poisonous. The split is nearly even: 51.8% edible, 48.2% poisonous. The charts below show which features are most useful for telling them apart. Odor is by far the most powerful signal — if a mushroom smells foul, fishy, spicy, pungent, or musty, every single sample in this dataset is poisonous.

Overall edible vs poisonous

Odor — the strongest predictor

Habitat breakdown

Spore print color

Cap color

⚠️ Key field rules (derived from research on this dataset)

Rule 1 · 98.5% accurate If the odor is not almond, anise, or none — it is almost certainly poisonous.

Rule 2 · 99.4% accurate Green spore print color → almost certainly poisonous.

Rule 3 · 99.9% accurate No odor + scaly stalk below ring + stalk not brown above ring → likely poisonous.

Warning · 100% accurate White cap growing on leaves, or white cap growing in clusters → always poisonous in this dataset.

Feature Lab

How well does each characteristic separate edible from poisonous? Higher bar = stronger signal.

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← Click any feature to see its breakdown

Cross-Feature Explorer

Pick two features and see how each combination skews towards edible (green) or poisonous (red).

Row feature Column feature

All edible

All poisonous