Forest Explorer

A map-based tool for finding good mushroom/berry foraging spots in Norway. Click anywhere on the map and it scores the surrounding area by combining real terrain (slope, aspect, elevation), weather history (recent rainfall, temperature, humidity, wind), and forest-cover data (species, land type, canopy density) into a single suitability score, tunable per foraging target (chanterelles, ceps, blueberries, lingonberries, cloudberries, or a general blend).

Live demo

What it does

• Composite scoring: weather, rainfall recency, forest type, and terrain (slope/aspect/wetness) combine into one 0–1 suitability score per point, re-weighted by zoom level and foraging target.
• Per-layer breakdown: toggle any individual signal (temperature, humidity, wind, solar radiation, VPD, topographic wetness index, forest type) as its own heatmap or grid overlay, not just the blended score.
• Top-spot highlighting: the best-scoring points within your chosen radius are marked distinctly on the map.
• Protected-area awareness: national parks, nature reserves, and landscape protection areas are excluded from suggestions entirely, with a visible boundary and explanation rather than an unexplained gap.
• Reference overlays: stand-age class, crown cover, and historical clear-cut data shown as raw map layers for context.

Data sources

• MET Norway: Locationforecast (forward-looking weather) and Frost (real historical station observations)
• NIBIO: AR5 land-cover classification and SR16 forest-resource maps (tree species, crown cover, stand age)
• Miljødirektoratet: protected-areas register and historical harvest/clear-cut satellite data
• Terrain elevation via Mapbox Terrain-RGB tiles

None of this data is redistributed. The app queries these services live.

Tech stack

React 19 + TypeScript + Vite, Leaflet/react-leaflet for the map, TanStack Query for data fetching, Vitest for unit tests, Playwright for e2e.

Running it locally

npm install
cp .env.example .env   # see below for what to fill in
npm run dev

The app works with .env completely empty: every external data source degrades gracefully rather than crashing. Two optional keys unlock more:

• VITE_MAPBOX_TOKEN: real terrain (slope/aspect/elevation). Without it, terrain scoring is simply skipped. Get a free one at account.mapbox.com.
• FROST_CLIENT_ID: real historical weather-station observations instead of forecast-derived estimates. Free at frost.met.no.

See .env.example for details on both.

Other commands

npm run build       # production build
npm run typecheck   # tsc --noEmit
npm run lint         # eslint
npm test             # vitest
npm run test:e2e     # playwright (hits live upstream APIs, no mocking)

The e2e suite deliberately hits real upstream APIs (thredds.met.no, Frost, Yr) instead of mocking them. Two real bugs this project hit only ever showed up against the live network: a CORS failure invisible to Node's fetch, and a query-encoding bug that only broke against the real server. No mocked test would have caught either before shipping.

Deployment

Configured for Vercel: the /api/* routes in this repo are serverless functions mirroring the same proxies the Vite dev server runs locally (see api/ and server/), so no code changes are needed between environments. Push to GitHub, import the repo in Vercel, and set VITE_MAPBOX_TOKEN/FROST_CLIENT_ID under Project Settings → Environment Variables (both are optional, same as local dev).

If you set a Mapbox token, restrict it to your deployed domain under your Mapbox account's token settings. It's a public-type token that ends up in the shipped client JS either way, so the restriction, not secrecy, is what actually limits misuse.

Project notes

TODO.md tracks known gaps and open investigations: a land-mask edge case, ongoing work on detecting recently-disturbed stands.