Plant communities in northern Quebec-Labrador, Canada have been severely grazed and trampled since the early 1980s by the increasingly large George River caribou herd (GRCH). To evaluate changes in species dominance associated with caribou disturbance, we compared past and present ground vegetation from 14 lichen woodlands. Plant remains from superficial organic horizons indicate that ground ve...

We sought to assess impacts of fire and grazing by reindeer and caribou on lichen communities in northwestern Alaska. Macrolichen abundance was estimated from 45, 0.38-ha plots. Eighteen of those plots, scattered throughout the southern Seward Peninsula, represented two levels of grazing, heavy and light. We found lightly grazed areas had taller lichens and greater total lichen cover than heavi...

The structure of the associated bacterial community of bipartite cyanolichens of the genus Peltigera from three different environmental contexts in the Karukinka Natural Park, Tierra del Fuego, Chile, was assessed. The sampling sites represent different habitat contexts: mature native forest, young native forest and grassland. Recently it has been determined that the bacterial community associa...

Lichens comprise highly diverse and complex microbial communities, the majority consisting of mycobiont, photobiont, Basidiomycetes yeast bacteriobiont (internal bacterial communities). In this study, diversity foliose lichen was reported. Next generation sequence (NGS) such as Illumina Sequencing (150*2) 16S rRNA (V3 V6 region) used to delineate communities associated with five samples. Bacter...

Lichens are known to be more sensitive indicators of ecosystem functioning and disturbances than any other cryptogams and vascular plant communities. Himalayan habitats, despite their stressed climates, harbor some of the unique biodiversity of the region, vital for overall ecosystem functioning and stability. Lichens, due to their desiccation tolerance, are able to survive in high altitude hab...

In the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica, microorganisms colonize the pore spaces of exposed rocks and are thereby protected from the desiccating environmental conditions on the surface. These cryptoendolithic communities have received attention in microscopy and culture-based studies but have not been examined by molecular approaches. We surveyed the microbial biodiversity of selected cryptoen...

Lichens are obligate symbioses between fungi and green algae or cyanobacteria. Most lichens resynthesize their symbiotic thalli from propagules, but some develop within the structures of already existing lichen symbioses. Diploschistes muscorum starts as a parasite infecting the lichen Cladonia symphycarpa and gradually develops an independent Diploschistes lichen thallus. Here we studied how t...