Mapping for Good – Falling Fruit – May 2017

For this month’s edition of Mapping for Good, we’ll take a look at a clever project started right here in our hometown of Boulder, CO. As stated on their website, “Falling Fruit is a celebration of the overlooked culinary bounty of our city streets.” More simply, it’s an interactive map that shows you where fruit-bearing trees and edible plants are in your neighborhood and around the world. With over 1,200,312 locations already mapped, chances are you can use Falling Fruit to find free food in the city nearest you.

What’s great about Falling Fruit is that like so many other projects we’ve covered, it’s information is both crowdsourced and open source: anyone can edit the database and download it with just one click.

I thought I’d give it a try myself and add the crab apples on my street in the Mapleton neighborhood of Boulder. I went to Falling Fruit’s site and to my surprise found out that someone had already beaten me to it! This made me realize just how detailed the project and its contributors are; and soon after I found myself looking for tasty trees within walking distance of my house. While I figured there would be some good foraging spots in the neighborhood with our high density of trees and one of the city’s biggest parks nearby, I was blown away at just how many of them were already logged. Beyond the sheer number of sites logged, I found myself even more entertained by the number of plants and trees I’d never heard of that were deemed edible.

So if you’re looking for a way to take advantage of an often wasted resource or just want to have some fun looking for fruit in the area, make sure to check out our fellow Boulderites’ awesome project at www.fallingfruit.org.

Fletcher Berryman
Cloud Tamer
(970) 710-0909
fletcher@apollomapping.com