Hello all,

I've received a few messages requesting an update on my proposed
lichen air-quality monitoring project. Presently, the project is
still in the oraganizational stage, where I am working out financial
and organizational details. In the meantime, one of my students has
been using our microwave digestion system and new ICP-MS to analyze
air particulate matter for various components and the system seems
to be working well. [This is the new equipment we recently
purchased and will be the central part of the lichen analysis.] So
progress in the chemical analysis side of things is going smoothly.

Once the weather gets a little better, I would like to get
together with other interested lichen enthusiasts for introductions
to each other and the lichen of the area (remember, I'm both new to
Chicago AND lichen hunting in general). To get some of the creative
juices flowing, here are some things I'm chewing on right now and
would love to get some input:

1.) For a qualitative analysis of air quality, others have used a
passive monitoring technique where one simply measures the relative
density of common to uncommon lichen species in a given area.
Physcia appear to me to be the "common" species that can be found in
most urban parks/high school campuses/well-watered back yards in the
Chicagoland area. I don't know what a reasonable uncommon species
would be (candelaria???). I presume we could use crustose species
in this portion of the project since it is passive monitoring, but
that would limit our ability to correlate the data with collected
and analyzed lichen. Coming up with a reasonable, consistent method
of measuring "lichen density" will take some work and I'm looking
for suggestions.

2.) Active monitoring with native species would involve collecting a
common species (again, Physcia seems to be good candidate). More
knowledgeable lichenologists might be able to provide input as to
estimating age of samples, and possible dependence of lichen growth
on substrate (i.e. how important would it be to collect lichen
samples from the same type of tree?).

3.) Active monitoring with non-native species eliminates the
temporal difficulties found in the previous question since we would
know how long the sample was at a particular location. What would
be a good non-native species that could: (a) act as a good air-
quality indicator; (b) survive in the Chicagoland environs long
enough for the study but not so long as to accidentally become an
invasive species; (c) can be easily purchased or harvested. I
purchased some brown-eye wolf lichen from the Nature zone, but was
told that the product is being discontinued.

4.) Perhaps most importantly, how engaged do volunteers want to get
in this project? How can we involve students at high schools and
junior high schools? My first idea was to have non-native species
placed on school campuses where students can monitor environmental
events (strong rains, ozone action day, big pile-up on the
neighboring highway...) and then submit portions of the lichen to
CSU for analysis. For those of you not in high school, how engaged
do you want to get in lichen collecting, monitoring, running some of
the instrumentation at CSU?


Any comments are always appreciated, and those close to CSU or Hyde
Park should drop me a line so I can buy you a coffee and chat about
lichen. (The coffee is slightly better in Hyde Park, now that the
CSU cafeteria has stopped serving Krispy Kreme donuts.)

If you got this far, thanks for reading and letting me clutter your
inbox.

BoB