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Pleopsidium Flavum
''Pleopsidium flavum'' (gold cobblestone lichen)The Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada, John Muir Laws , 2007 is a distinctively colored, bright lemon-yellow to chartreuseCrustose Rock Lichens, Wayne P. Armstrong, Wayne's World online textbook of natural history/ref> crustose lichen, crustose lichen that grows in high elevations ( montane to alpine) on vertical or overhanging hard felsic rock (e.g. granite) in western North America.Mosses Lichens & Ferns of Northwest North America, Dale H. Vitt, Janet E. marsh, Robin B. Bovey, Lone Pine Publishing Company, Its thallus grows in a circular outwardly radiating pattern ( placodioid), with 1mm wide lobed edges. This is the identity of the vivid, lime-green lichens often photographed on granite boulders in the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge of Oklahoma.According to Prof. Wayne Armstrong of Mount Palomar College, This lichen only grows "a few millimeters" per century. , making it the slowest growing of all known plants (sensu ...
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Fungi
A fungus ( : fungi or funguses) is any member of the group of eukaryotic organisms that includes microorganisms such as yeasts and molds, as well as the more familiar mushrooms. These organisms are classified as a kingdom, separately from the other eukaryotic kingdoms, which by one traditional classification include Plantae, Animalia, Protozoa, and Chromista. A characteristic that places fungi in a different kingdom from plants, bacteria, and some protists is chitin in their cell walls. Fungi, like animals, are heterotrophs; they acquire their food by absorbing dissolved molecules, typically by secreting digestive enzymes into their environment. Fungi do not photosynthesize. Growth is their means of mobility, except for spores (a few of which are flagellated), which may travel through the air or water. Fungi are the principal decomposers in ecological systems. These and other differences place fungi in a single group of related organisms, named the ''Eumycota'' (''t ...
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Thallus
Thallus (plural: thalli), from Latinized Greek (), meaning "a green shoot" or "twig", is the vegetative tissue of some organisms in diverse groups such as algae, fungi, some liverworts, lichens, and the Myxogastria. Many of these organisms were previously known as the thallophytes, a polyphyletic group of distantly related organisms. An organism or structure resembling a thallus is called thalloid, thallodal, thalliform, thalline, or thallose. A thallus usually names the entire body of a multicellular non-moving organism in which there is no organization of the tissues into organs. Even though thalli do not have organized and distinct parts (leaves, roots, and stems) as do the vascular plants, they may have analogous structures that resemble their vascular "equivalents". The analogous structures have similar function or macroscopic structure, but different microscopic structure; for example, no thallus has vascular tissue. In exceptional cases such as the Lemnoideae, where ...
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Arctic
The Arctic ( or ) is a polar regions of Earth, polar region located at the northernmost part of Earth. The Arctic consists of the Arctic Ocean, adjacent seas, and parts of Canada (Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut), Danish Realm (Greenland), Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia (Murmansk Oblast, Murmansk, Siberia, Nenets Autonomous Okrug, Nenets Okrug, Novaya Zemlya), Sweden and the United States (Alaska). Land within the Arctic region has seasonally varying snow and sea ice, ice cover, with predominantly treeless permafrost (permanently frozen underground ice) containing tundra. Arctic seas contain seasonal sea ice in many places. The Arctic region is a unique area among Earth's ecosystems. The cultures in the region and the Arctic indigenous peoples have adapted to its cold and extreme conditions. Life in the Arctic includes zooplankton and phytoplankton, fish and marine mammals, birds, land animals, plants and human societies. Arctic land is bordered by the subarctic. De ...
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Pleopsidium Chlorophanum
''Pleopsidium chlorophanum'' (gold cobblestone lichen)The Laws Field Guide to the Sierra Nevada, John Muir Laws , 2007 is a distinctively colored, bright lemon-yellow to chartreuseCrustose Rock Lichens, Wayne P. Armstrong, Wayne's World online textbook of natural history/ref> crustose lichen, which favors dry arctic or alpine sandstone cliffs and boulders. It is a rare alpine lichen in Europe. It is in the ''Pleopsidium'' genus of the Acarosporaceae family. This lichen is one of the few species able to survive at high altitudes in Antarctica, at altitudes of up to . It is able to cope with high UV, low temperatures and dryness. In its Antarctic habitat, it can be found on the surface, but it is mainly found in cracks, where just a small amount of scattered light reaches it. This is probably an adaptive behaviour to protect it from UV light and desiccation. It remains metabolically active in temperatures down to -20 C, and can absorb small amounts of liquid water in an environment ...
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Terricolous Lichen
A terricolous lichen is a lichen that grows on the soil as a substrate. An example is some members of the genus ''Peltigera ''Peltigera'' is a genus of approximately 100 species of foliose lichens in the family Peltigeraceae. Commonly known as the dog or pelt lichens, species of ''Peltigera'' are often terricolous (growing on soil), but can also occur on moss, trees, ...''. References Lichenology {{lichen-stub ...
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Acarospora Schleicheri
''Acarospora schleicheri'', the soil paint lichen, is a bleached to bright yellow areolate to squamulose lichen that commonly grows to on soil (terricolous) in arid habitats of southern California and Baja California, also in Europe and Africa.Field Guide to California Lichens, Stephen Sharnoff, Yale University Press, 2014, ''Acarospora schleicheri'', Lichen Flora of the Greater Sonoran Desert Region. Vol 3., Nash, T.H., Ryan, B.D., Gries, C., Bugartz, F., (eds.) 2001/ref> It produces rhizocarpic acid as a secondary metabolite, which gives it a yellow coloration and serves to protect it from the sun. Its lower surface is also yellow. It can be greenish when moist. Roundish, angular, or irregularly shaped squamules are 0.5–4 mm in diameter. There are 0–1 (sometimes 2–3) apothecia embedded in the thallus, with 0.4–1.2 mm roundish black to reddish-brown, or dark brown discs, which sometimes fill the areola so as to be lecanorine. It divides vegetatively on the s ...
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Family (biology)
Family ( la, familia, plural ') is one of the eight major hierarchical taxonomic ranks in Linnaean taxonomy. It is classified between order and genus. A family may be divided into subfamilies, which are intermediate ranks between the ranks of family and genus. The official family names are Latin in origin; however, popular names are often used: for example, walnut trees and hickory trees belong to the family Juglandaceae, but that family is commonly referred to as the "walnut family". What belongs to a family—or if a described family should be recognized at all—are proposed and determined by practicing taxonomists. There are no hard rules for describing or recognizing a family, but in plants, they can be characterized on the basis of both vegetative and reproductive features of plant species. Taxonomists often take different positions about descriptions, and there may be no broad consensus across the scientific community for some time. The publishing of new data and opini ...
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Genus
Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of extant taxon, living and fossil organisms as well as Virus classification#ICTV classification, viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus comes above species and below family (taxonomy), family. In binomial nomenclature, the genus name forms the first part of the binomial species name for each species within the genus. :E.g. ''Panthera leo'' (lion) and ''Panthera onca'' (jaguar) are two species within the genus ''Panthera''. ''Panthera'' is a genus within the family Felidae. The composition of a genus is determined by taxonomy (biology), taxonomists. The standards for genus classification are not strictly codified, so different authorities often produce different classifications for genera. There are some general practices used, however, including the idea that a newly defined genus should fulfill these three criteria to be descriptively useful: # monophyly – all descendants ...
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Acarospora
''Acarospora'' is a genus of mostly lichen-forming fungi in the family Acarosporaceae. Most species in the genus are crustose lichens that grow on rocks in open and arid places all over the world. They may look like a cobblestone road or cracked up old paint, and are commonly called cobblestone lichens or cracked lichens.Field Guide to California Lichens, Stephen Sharnoff, Yale University Press, 2014, They usually grow on rock (are "saxicolous"), but some grow on soil (terricolous) or on other lichens. Some species in the genus are fungi that live as parasites on other lichens (lichenicolous fungi). ''Acarospora'' is a widely distributed genus, with about 128 species according to a 2008 estimate. Species in ''Acarospora'' may be shiny as if covered with a glossy varnish, or dull and powdery looking. They have a diverse range of colors, from the brilliant yellow bright cobblestone lichen, to the dark reddish-brown mountain cobblestone lichen, or they can appear tan, gray, or w ...
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Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge
Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, located in southwestern Oklahoma near Lawton, has protected unique wildlife habitats since 1901 and is the oldest managed wildlife facility in the United States Fish and Wildlife Service system. The refuge's location in the geologically unique Wichita Mountains and its areas of undisturbed mixed grass prairie make it an important conservation area. The Wichitas are approximately 500 million years old. Measuring about , the refuge hosts a great diversity of species: 806 plant species, 240 species of birds, 36 fish, and 64 reptiles and amphibians are present. History The Wichita Forest Reserve was established by the General Land Office in Oklahoma on July 4, 1901, with . After the transfer of federal forests to the U.S. Forest Service in 1905, it became a National Forest on March 4, 1907, as Wichita National Forest. On November 27, 1936, the forest was abolished and transferred to the Bureau of Biological Survey, a precursor to the Fish and Wil ...
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Placodioid Lichen
Lichens are composite organisms made up of multiple species: a fungal partner, one or more photosynthetic partners, and sometimes a basidiomycete yeast. They are regularly grouped by their external appearance – a characteristic known as their growth form. Lichenologists have described a dozen of these forms: areolate, byssoid, calicioid, cladoniform, crustose, filamentous, foliose, fruticose, gelatinous, leprose, placoidioid and squamulose. Of these, crustose, foliose and fruticose are the most commonly encountered. With the exception of calicioid lichens, growth forms are based on the appearance of the thallus, which is the vegetative (non-reproductive) part of the lichen. In most species, this form is determined by the lichen's fungal partner, though in a small number, it is instead the photobiont that determines the lichen's morphology. In some growth forms, the outermost layer of the thallus consists of tightly woven fungal . This layer, known as the cortex, may be fo ...
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Granite
Granite () is a coarse-grained (phaneritic) intrusive igneous rock composed mostly of quartz, alkali feldspar, and plagioclase. It forms from magma with a high content of silica and alkali metal oxides that slowly cools and solidifies underground. It is common in the continental crust of Earth, where it is found in igneous intrusions. These range in size from dikes only a few centimeters across to batholiths exposed over hundreds of square kilometers. Granite is typical of a larger family of ''granitic rocks'', or ''granitoids'', that are composed mostly of coarse-grained quartz and feldspars in varying proportions. These rocks are classified by the relative percentages of quartz, alkali feldspar, and plagioclase (the QAPF classification), with true granite representing granitic rocks rich in quartz and alkali feldspar. Most granitic rocks also contain mica or amphibole minerals, though a few (known as leucogranites) contain almost no dark minerals. Granite is nearly alway ...
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