Signy Island has experienced a dramatic increase in fur seal numbers over recent decades, which has led to the devastation of lowland terrestrial vegetation, with the eradication of moss turfs and carpets being the most prominent feature. Here we demonstrate that fur seals also affect the other major component of this region’s typical cryptogamic vegetation, the lichens, although with a lower d...

Abstract The altitudinal patterns of lichen communities in gradients are very variable. changes that occur along the mountains depend on climatic factors but also microsite variables such as substrate type and aspect. effect altitude aspect richness, cover composition saxicolous lichens an elevation gradient extra Andean from central-west Argentina was studied. Rock outcrops north south three m...

Biological soil crust (BSC) communities (composed of lichens, bryophytes, and cyanobacteria) may be more dynamic on short-time scales than previously thought, requiring new and informative short-term monitoring techniques. We used repeat digital photography and image analysis, which revealed a change in area of a dominant BSC lichen, Collema tenax. The data generated correlated well with gross ...

The lichen symbiosis allows a self-sustained life under harsh environmental conditions, yet symbiotic integrity can be affected by fungal parasites. Nothing is known about the impact of these biologically diverse and often specific infections on the recently detected bacterial community in lichens. To address this question, we studied the arctic-alpine 'chocolate chip lichen' Solorina crocea, w...

Question: What are the responses of epiphytic lichens to the intensity of management along a large environmental gradient in Mediterranean Quercus forests? Location: Central Spain. Methods: This study was carried out on 4590 trees located in 306 forest stands dominated by Quercus faginea or Quercus ilex ssp. ballota. The effect of forest management and other predictor variables on several speci...

BACKGROUND Recent evidence of specific bacterial communities extended the traditional concept of fungal-algal lichen symbioses by a further organismal kingdom. Although functional roles were already assigned to dominant members of the highly diversified microbiota, a substantial fraction of the ubiquitous colonizers remained unexplored. We employed a multi-omics approach to further characterize...

Climatic fluctuations largely affects species turnover and cause major shifts of terrestrial ecosystem. In the present study the five decade old herbarium specimens of lichens were compared with recent collection from Darjeeling district with respect to elements, PAHs accumulation and carbon isotope composition (δ(13)C) to explore the changes in climatic conditions and its impact on lichen flor...

Terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (TRF or T-RFLP) analysis and 16S rDNA sequence analysis from clone libraries were used to examine cyanobacterial diversity in three types of predominant soil crusts in an arid grassland. Total DNA was extracted from cyanobacteria-, lichen-, or moss-dominated crusts that represent different successional stages in crust development, and which cont...

Background: In this article, it was analyzed how snow melting affects the assembly of lichen and moss communities in a small area of the coastal region of Barton Peninsula, which is in maritime Antarctic. In the small area, even though there is a huge gap of difference of the environment between the snow-filled area and snow-melt one, the latter did not have distinctive environmental gradients....