Find the Best Fall Foliage With These Crowdsourced Maps

Fall foliage is gorgeous but challenging. In some areas, you can wait an entire year for the leaves to change – only to wake up one morning and they are all on the ground. Or, if you live in a place that doesn’t have four seasons, you may have used prediction maps to plan when and where you are going to travel. This is great, but like everything else in life, catching leaves at the peak of their perfect color change isn’t guaranteed.

So if leaf watching is high on your fall to-do list, you might want to look to some of the fall foliage crowdsourced maps available. Heck, you might even want to become a volunteer leaf color reporter yourself. Depending on the region, you have several options.

State of new york

Autumn is the perfect time to explore upstate New York. Luckily, I Love NY has a weekly foliage map and report that tells you everything you need to know. Data for the reports is collected by a team of approximately 65 volunteer peers located in 11 regions of the state. New reports and maps are released every Wednesday afternoon.

New england

If you associate one part of the country with fall foliage, it’s probably New England. You may have even planned a trip to see it. In that case – or if you live in the area – you should take a look at this live map of fall foliage. It spans Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont, and relies on locals and visitors to report leaf discoloration in the area. To report what you see, simply enter your zip code on the map and answer a few questions.

Shenandoah National Park

Last year, Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park began asking visitors to help track their changing leaves, and then produced a weekly report based on the submissions. If you would like to participate, send your photo to the park (they only ask to send one per week) along with the following information:

  • Where was this photo taken
  • When the photo was taken
  • What name do you want for credit (please, no watermarks)
  • Declaration that we have permission to use your photo for the fall gallery
  • Email shen_fall@nps.gov

There are no reports for this year yet, as it is too early. But you can check last year’s reports to see what comes next.

Northeast, Southeast and Midwest

Thanks to the folks at Fall Foliage Network , Northeast , Southeast, and Midwest foliage change reports are available twice a week. As with other sites, they have foliage watchers in different parts of each state in each region, and they issue maps and reports based on the data these volunteers submit. Reports are published on Mondays and Thursdays.

If you don’t see the locality you live in or visit on this list, Trip Savvy has put together a guide to states when leaves usually change, and more importantly, provided a foliage hotline for each location, like Well.

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