Y’all I’m really excited about this guide and everyone else I’ve talked to in person didn’t quite get my excitement.
I have a niche interest in lichens. They are near impossible for me to ID but I’m still trying to learn what I can. (its overwhelming).
But I’ve been looking for the three guidebooks that came out of Arizona State University. I had e-mailed someone, I forget whom, a while back and never got a response but when I went to check today to see if I could get them ordered I found links, they are posted online as PDFs!
One of them I know is out of print but the other two I’m not sure. But it doesn’t matter they are free to download!
Its the lichen flora of the greater sonoran region.
Is a “guide” the same thing as a “species key” or? People keep mentioning them and I still don’t know what they are.
yea, it was a giant key to the sonoran desert!
I started using the guide as a tool for challenges, expeditions, and competitions.
I define the species, set up the map so collaborators can see where to find them, and launch the challenge: whoever finds the most wins.
Like a treasure map, you can print it out and go on a search.
like this
https://www.inaturalist.org/guides/23790
Congratulations on finding some useful guides!
What feels overwhelming on your own can turn into an exciting adventure if you team up with a local expert:
Plus, unlike some mushrooms that only appear after rain, macrolichens are present all year long!
not exactly the same, but there was an old, long out-of-print guide I had been wanting to buy (the seminal work for the region at the time), but all the second hand copies being sold online were going for $500-600. I then stumbled on one being sold for $270! Couldn’t believe my luck, bought it straight away
This guides thing is really neat, it’s not exactly the same thing as a species key, though. A key is a flow chart for a clade that allows you to determine what species or genus an animal is in by looking at a series of traits.
Most species keys for ants are written with the assumption that you have a specimen under a microscope. They can be hard to use with photos. But, they are still very valuable. Because often the most obvious traits aren’t deterministic of species.
For example with ants, color is often misleading, even if you might notice it first. The shape of the petiole? Now that tends to be more useful.
A species key will apply to a particular location for a clade. But there is overlap in the keys used to determine species. This has made me wonder if it’d be possible to make a data encoding protocol, a kind of API that would allow you to save facts such as:
“Lasius niger has standing hairs on the scapes”
“Lasius alienus has smooth scapes”
And then generate custom keys based on contex. This could greatly improve the number of people who could do high-quality IDs. Since taxonomic data are already in the system you have the bins, you just need a way to save the best facts one ought to use to do the sorting.
Well, maybe someday…
First off, thanks for whoever moved the topic, I wasn’t sure where to put it.
Second, I mean guide as in fieldguide, not the iNat guide.
There is a key in one of them somewhere, its a total of almost 1800 pages so I have some reading to go through. I’m always on the lookout for better ways to understand the lichens and their taxonomy. I’ve just always been interested in a “full ecology” with the focus on the smaller things that interact in ways we don’t understand.
Like Lichen Moths, their larva eat lichens? its such an “expensive” food source.
I mean if you could get one together that’d be great. I"m just nowhere near being able to do that wth anything.
yea the only copy of this guide I could find online was near $1K which I’m not prepared to spend on it.