Tricia Nicholson REU 2018

Hi there!My name is Tricia Nicholson and this summer I'm serving as a research assistant to Dr. Matt Nelsen at the Field Museum of Natural History At the Field, I am responsible for studying lichens, and today I'm going to tell you why you should care about them and what makes them so cool. So what is a lichen, exactly? A lichen is a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and an algae or cyanobacteria working together to create a new organism. Since there are so many unique combinations of fungi and algal partners lichens come in a wide variety of beautiful shapes and sizes. Lichens are important because they cover almost 8% of the globe's land In addition, some are bioindicators, which means they reflect the air conditions of the world around them, so we know when the air is clean or polluted. Although they occur everywhere on Earth, some lichens prefer different conditions than others. This is Cetraria glauca and this specific lichen was collected in France all the way back in 1868. This is just one occurrence for one species. Here at the Field, I'm currently looking at thousands of occurrences for over two hundred species. That's a lot of data, but computer programs like "R" make it easy for me to extract many locations and occurrences at once and consolidate the findings into one big list.