“Old Blue” out of the blue! While conducting lichen community surveys and tissue collections for the United States Forest Service (USFS) air quality biomonitoring program in the Glacier Peak Wilderness we stumbled upon a population of Pseudocyphellaria rainierensis that has yet to be documented as far as our records show. Since our study began in June 2021, we have been documenting the presence/absence of P. rainierensis at historic collection and observation sites. During those revisits we have been recording data pertaining to the habitat in which the species is found, including stand age, species composition, canopy cover, and site morphometry. We intend to use the element occurrence data from our survey sites to create a model that can be used to locate currently unknown populations of P. rainierensis – if we don’t happen upon them first.
Leave a Reply