Lichens are abundant and often noticed by the interested public but more often than not, they lack the resources to better understand these fascinating symbioses. Lichens are usually a fungus (ascomycete 99% of the time), an algae or a cyanobacteria (and occasionally all three) living in one growth form. In the Black Hills, lichens cover rocks, trees and soil in many places. By virtue of the many different rock types in the Hills, there are many species of lichens are able to exist. The Black Hills are also very old, where many species persisted during past glaciations. The Hills are also the cross roads of biogeographical ranges of many species. The biogeographical mixing of many species pools combined with diverse substrates and age of these mountains creates an interesting place for a lichenologist and naturalist to learn the lichens. However, there are essentially no resources tailored to learning the lichens of the Black Hills. The lichen flora, published in 1963, is out of print and is written for a more technical audience and has no pictures for the visually inclined. To remedy this situation, this project's goals are to 1) photograph lichens in the Hills for the public to use as a learning resource 2) improve range maps of lichen species distributions and 3) document species that were unknown to exist here.

Logo for this project provided by Mary Zimmerman (http://www.greeninkgalleryandstudios.com/Mary's_Art.htm) menos ↑