Deficiently known forest lichens – identification through DNA barcodes

Leena Myllys, Saara Velmala, Juha Pykälä, Kimmo Jääskeläinen

Of ca.1770 lichen species in Finland, 500 are so insufficiently known that they have been left out of the evaluation process of threatened species. Most of these deficiently known lichen species are crustose in growth form, are often very small and have only few morphological characters, which can also be highly variable. As a result identification and even collecting these species is very difficult. Consequently, taxonomy of many groups is far from resolved.

The purpose of this project is to use DNA barcoding for identification of deficiently known lichens. We use internal transcribed spacers as a DNA barcode region, because it is the most popular locus for species identification in mycological research. We will focus on five lichen genera, which include a large number of deficiently known species in forest habitats, i.e. Arthonia, Lecania, Lecanora, Micarea and Verrucaria. As a first step we will use reliably identified specimens to create a reference database. We use ca. 3–5 specimens per each species to detect infraspecific variation. After this we can identify also poorly developed specimens and evaluate taxonomy, distribution and threat status of each species. We will also expect to find yet undetected (e.g. cryptic) species by investigating genetic diversity.

The project is funded by the Ministry of Environment and is part of the PUTTE II program.

Project's DNA-database.