Survey And Assessment Of Epiphytic Lichen Habitats PDF Download

"Between 1989 and 2012, three Forest Service programs collected more than 8,300 surveys of epiphytic lichen communities, providing a baseline for tracking lichen responses to air quality, climate, and other changes on forest land in the United States. This national atlas of lichen species combines these datasets into distribution maps for more than 400 taxa and 6,000 forested locations across the country. All 115,500 lichen records presented in the maps link to voucher specimens, most of which can be accessed from herbaria. Unlike mapped herbarium records, most surveys were collected on a systematic national grid. Therefore, the absence of a species at a particular location can indicate meaningful information about its geographic distribution. Facets of the survey protocol, however, likely lead to the underrepresentation of rare, cryptic, and otherwise easily overlooked species in the dataset. Each species search lasted 2 hours, covering a nearly 1-a area in which surveyors aimed to capture all epiphytic macrolichens. Surveyors possessed various skill levels but underwent annual training, certification, and field audits by professional lichenologists. During the 23 years of data collection, many lichen names and species concepts have changed. This atlas dataset is the first to unite all records across the three parent programs by using a consistent taxonomic treatment. In some cases, maps represent "lumped" taxa or show only records from restricted timeframes. The species distribution maps, Atlas dataset, and tools for designing custom datasets are published online at https://www.fia.fs.fed.us/program-features/indicators/lichen."