Lichens, fungi, and bryophytes are frequently referred to as lower plants, non-vascular plants, or cryptogams. All terms are partially incorrect but used for convenience. Strictly speaking only bryophytes are plants. Although lacking conductive tissues, they are photosynthetic. Fungi are not photosynthetic, typically penetrating their substrate as threads of cells. Lichens are fungi in close as...

Human activity is changing air quality and climate in the US Pacific Northwest. In a first application of non-metric multidimensional scaling to a large-scale, framework dataset, we modeled lichen community response to air quality and climate gradients at 1416 forested 0.4 ha plots. Model development balanced polluted plots across elevation, forest type and precipitation ranges to isolate pollu...

fOR the Past 24 yeaRs, BIOlOgIsts haVe studied lichens in the Great Lakes national park units in considerable detail (see map), including floras and chemical element surveys, for biodiversity and air quality assessments. They have studied lichens because they are sentinel species indicating ecosystem health, and because they are excellent biomonitoring and bioindicator species of air quality. T...

This experiment was aimed at establishing, for the first time, the survival capability of lichens exposed to space conditions. In particular, the damaging effect of various wavelengths of extraterrestrial solar UV radiation was studied. The lichens used were the bipolar species Rhizocarpon geographicum and Xanthoria elegans, which were collected above 2000 m in the mountains of central Spain an...

In the study the activities of polonium 210Po and uranium 234U, 238U radionuclides in moss and lichen samples were determined using the alpha spectrometry. Different lichens and mosses were collected around the Sobieszewo Island (northern Poland) and investigated for potential use as biomonitors for 210Po and 238U deposition. Mosses and lichens have a high efficiency in capturing 210Po and 238U...

A list of 62 taxa (61 species) of lichens and 7 species of lichenicolous fungi from the Una National Park in the north-western part of Bosnia and Herzegovina is presented. The lichens Caloplaca crenulatella, Dimerella pineti, Lecanora expallens, Lopadium disciforme, Placynthiella icmalea, Toninia athallina and the lichenicolous fungi Abrothallus bertianus, A. parmeliarum, Cornutispora lichenico...

Pendulous lichens dominate canopies of boreal forests, with dark Bryoria species in the upper canopy vs. light Alectoria and Usnea species in lower canopy. These genera offer important ecosystem services such as winter forage for reindeer and caribou. The mechanism behind this niche separation is poorly understood. We tested the hypothesis that species-specific sunscreening fungal pigments prot...

Antimicrobial activity of the acetone-, methanoland aqueousextracts of the lichens Lecanora atra, L. muralis, Parmelia saxatilis, P. sulcata and Parmeliopsis ambigua was explored in vitro against to six species of bacteria and 10 species of fungi, by the disc-diffusion method and determination of the minimal inhibitory concentration (MIC) by the Broth tube Dilution method. The aqueous extracts ...

Parmelioid lichens form a species-rich group of predominantly foliose and fruticose lichenized fungi encompassing a broad range of morphological and chemical diversity. Using a multilocus approach, we reconstructed a phylogeny including 323 OTUs of parmelioid lichens and employed ancestral character reconstruction methods to understand the phenotypical evolution within this speciose group of li...