Terms of use

What Herbarium is

It is a field guide to the plants you meet while walking in Portugal and Spain. It is there to tell you the name of what is in front of you, what it is, and what it gets confused with. It is free and needs no account.

What Herbarium is not, and this is the important part

It is not medical, dietary or foraging advice. No entry tells you that you can eat a plant, and that is not an oversight: it is a product rule. The edible tag means the plant was traditionally used as food, in a time and a place, and nothing more. The medicinal tag means traditional use, in the past, and never a dose or an indication.

Identifying is not authorising. A correct identification, made by you or by photo mode, does not tell you the plant is safe for you, in that amount, at that stage of ripeness, in that place, with your health and your medication. No app has the authority to say that, and this one owns up to it rather than hiding it.

There are no mushrooms in this app, by risk decision. The margin for error with fungi is too small and the consequences too large.

Photo mode gets things wrong, and we know how often

Photo mode returns guesses with a confidence score, not answers. A study published in Clinical Toxicology tested four of the world's most used apps and found 76% accuracy at genus level and 58% at species level, which is the level that decides whether a plant is eaten. Five of eleven toxic species were identified as edible by at least one app.

That is why, when a guess lands on a dangerous plant, this app treats every guess as dangerous and shows the warning before showing the result. If confidence is low, we say so rather than choosing for you.

Picking plants has rules that are not ours

Several species described here are protected by national law, by the Habitats Directive or by CITES, and picking them is illegal, bulbs and orchids included. Protected areas have their own rules, and on private land you need the owner's permission. The entries flag what we know, but complying with the law where you are is your responsibility.

Who owns the content

The entry texts are written by us and belong to Backpackers World Adventures. The photographs are not ours: they come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences, and each one is credited on the entry and on the credits page with author, licence and a link to the source. We do not use images licensed against commercial use or derivative works.

If you are the author of a photograph and think the credit is wrong or the licence was misread, write to wabackpackers@gmail.com and we will correct it or take it down.

Mistakes, and what we do with them

The content is checked against reference botanical sources, but a database of hundreds of species contains errors. If you find one, especially in a toxicity warning or a lookalike, write to wabackpackers@gmail.com. Safety corrections take priority over everything else and go live as soon as they are confirmed.

To the extent the law allows, we are not answerable for decisions taken on the basis of the app, in particular for gathering and eating wild plants. This is not an attempt to dodge responsibility: it is the recognition that the decision to put something in your mouth belongs to whoever makes it, and that the app is designed never to make it for you.

Changes and governing law

These terms may be updated. The last updated date is at the top of this page, and changes with real impact are flagged in the app. Portuguese law applies and the courts of Leiria have jurisdiction, without prejudice to the consumer rights the law gives you in the country where you live.