If you want to know if you have truffles growing wild in your woodland, the best option to find out is to hire an experienced truffle hound and handler. A desktop study is undertaken from our office without visiting the wood. It offers a cheaper and quicker indication of whether the expense of hiring might be justified. For a larger site, it allows suitable areas to be prioritised for future checking and also it can be undertaken out of the truffle season (July – January). Truffles are not found everywhere; they require specific conditions to grow. A desktop study uses our extensive experience of finding truffles with published scientific studies to look at their requirements and determine if the environmental conditions in your woods are suitable for them. Some of the considerations are shown in the below diagram. It uses a Geographic Information System (GIS) based approach with relevant published map-based datasets supplemented with aerial and ground-level photography and our own unique databases of known truffle finds.
