Poison Atlas is a companion to Venom Atlas. Venom Atlas covers animals that bite and sting; this one covers the plants, mushrooms, and animals that harm people who eat, touch, or breathe them: death caps and destroying angels, hemlocks and foxglove, giant hogweed and poison ivy, pufferfish and sea turtles.
What it does
- A map you can explore. Every country, and the states and provinces of the largest ones, shaded by how many poisonous species live there. Pick a place to see what grows there, or pick a species to see where it's found.
- Native and introduced. Places where a species is native are filled in; places where it has been introduced and gone wild are hatched. Gardens and pot plants don't count.
- What it does to you. Each species page covers how people are exposed, which parts are toxic, the toxins, the symptoms, how soon they start, who is most at risk, and the edible plants and mushrooms it's mistaken for, with a warning when symptoms are dangerously delayed.
- Who to call. Species pages show the poison control number for the country you're looking at, each one checked against the service's own site.
- Built for phones. Like Venom Atlas, it installs like an app and keeps working offline for anything you've already looked at.
How it's built
- A source for every claim. Not just every place a species is listed, but every statement about it: toxic parts, toxins, symptoms, lookalikes. The build fails if a claim has none. So far that's 184 sources: clinical case reports and reviews, poison centres, and government health agencies.
- Ranges from records and checklists. As with Venom Atlas, a script asks GBIF where each species has been recorded, about 6 million records in all. For plants, the World Checklist of Vascular Plants decides whether a place is native or introduced. I review every proposal; so far 30 places have been added and 35 removed by hand, each with a citation.
- Safety first. It is not an identification or foraging guide, and never says how to make something safe to eat. A species being missing from the atlas doesn't mean it's safe.
Try it
Open poison-atlas.benjweaver.dev and pick a place, or look up a species. It's for education, not medical advice: if someone may have been poisoned, contact poison control or your local emergency number.
Spotted a mistake? Open an issue with a source, and I'll check it. The code is free software under the GPL, and the species data is CC BY-SA.