Crustose lichen communities on rocks exhibit fascinating spatial mosaics resembling political maps of nations or municipalities. Although the establishment and development of biological populations are important themes in ecology, our understanding of the formation of such patterns on the rocks is still in its infancy. Here, we present a novel model of the concurrent growth, establishment and i...

Introduction: Lichen dominated cryptoendolithic communities from the Dry Valleys of Antarctica have been the subject of much research over recent years owing to their potential as analogues of Martian lifeforms. This is primarily owing to the stress tolerant nature of the microorganisms, remarkable adaptive achievements and the similarities between the Antarctic Dry Valley ecosystems and condit...

Lichens are reputedly slow growing and become unhealthy or die in response to supplements of the usual limiting resources, such as water and nitrogen. We found, however, that the tripartite cyanobacterial lichen Lobaria pulmonaria doubled in annual biomass growth after a single 20-minute immersion in a phosphorus solution (K2HPO4), as compared to controls receiving no supplemental phosphorus. T...

Lichens are known to be bioaccumulators of atmospheric pollutants and are abundant in the Canadian arctic. Mining in this region may negatively impact the tundra communities and these impacts may be detected by increased accumulation of heavy metals, greenhouse gas constituents, and organic compounds in lichen tissue. The effect of sampling direction and distance from a diamond mine on bioaccum...

Aim We evaluate the scale dependence of species richness–environment relationships with a continent-wide analysis of lichen epiphyte communities. Specifically, our goals are to assess: (1) the dependence of local richness on regional processes, (2) whether species richness is primarily influenced by heterogeneity in environmental conditions or the central tendency of those conditions, and (3) w...

Critical loads (CLs) define maximum atmospheric deposition levels apparently preventative of ecosystem harm. We present first nitrogen CLs for northwestern North America's maritime forests. Using multiple linear regression, we related epiphytic-macrolichen community composition to: 1) wet deposition from the National Atmospheric Deposition Program, 2) wet, dry, and total N deposition from the C...

We investigated the potential for nonvascular epiphytic species (primarily lichens) to affect the quality of different host tree species for the vascular epiphyte Tillandsia usneoides in the southeastern USA. Different host tree species had substantially different abundances of Tillandsia, and these abundances were correlated with the composition of nonvascular epiphyte communities. In greenhou...

Air pollution and climate change are threats to maintaining ecological health of protected areas. Protected Area managers require a meaningful way to measure impacts of these threats. Lichens provide a relevant, sensitive and measurable indicator for long-term monitoring. Hundreds of studies have linked lichen communities to air quality, and several long-term lichen monitoring programs in Europ...