The literature will tell you that Claytonia perfoliata is edible. It will not tell you that the patch behind the creek crossing at kilometre 7 reliably flushes with basal leaves in the third week of March at that elevation, or that the population thins out in a dry year by early April while the stand on the north-facing slope holds another two weeks. That's field knowledge, and it lives or dies by whether you wrote it down.
What a Species Record Actually Requires
Plant Name is the entry point, but it carries more weight than it appears. Consistent binomial nomenclature across your records — Urtica dioica rather than "nettles" — means your Location and Date data stays sortable and searchable across years and across lookalike species that share common names but not edibility profiles. The confusion between Allium ursinum (ramsons, edible) and Convallaria majalis (lily of the valley, toxic) is entirely a common-name problem that doesn't survive proper scientific naming.
Image is non-negotiable for a foraging database. A photograph taken at the location of harvest, showing the leaf shape, stem cross-section, and habitat, is the identification record. Memory degrades. A photograph of the specimen you actually ate, from the specific population where you found it, anchored in the database next to the binomial and the location coordinates, is the kind of documentation that matters when you're trying to identify whether the sap on a new species matches anything in your existing records or when someone asks you to confirm an ID years later.
Information and Uses split the record into two distinct knowledge types that shouldn't be conflated. Information is the identification and ecology entry — vegetative description, flowering season, lookalike species, habitat preferences, toxicity of non-edible parts. Uses is the operational record — which parts, which preparation method, which season, what the palatability actually is after you've prepared it three different ways. Books document what's edible in principle. The Uses field documents what's worth eating in practice.
Location as the Long Game
Location combined with Date is where a foraging catalog becomes something more useful than a field guide annotation. The first entry for a plant at a location is a finding. The fifth entry, spanning three years, is a phenological record. You stop guessing when the ramps will be at harvestable stage and start knowing: this specific hollow, south-facing, near the seasonal stream, third week of April in a normal year, second week in a warm spring.
The GPS coordinates embedded in Location mean the record survives turnover in your personal mental map. After enough time, you have 40 or 50 active locations across different plant species. Without coordinates, "the big patch of watercress near the old mill site" becomes ambiguous around the fourth or fifth "old mill site" you know. With coordinates, it's a map point with attached seasonality and harvest notes.
Seasonal gaps in the Date record are also data. A species you documented at a location in years one, two, and four but not three correlates against weather records from that year. The pattern might explain why the population was absent — drought stress, late frost, deer browse — or why a different species was unusually abundant in its place.