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The BLS has made available £10,000 to help its members attend IAL8. We envisage making 25-30 awards in the region of £300-£460 each. Applicants must be BLS members when the application is submitted.
Applications should be sent to Heidi Döring (on membership@britishlichensociety.org.uk ) before 15 March 2016. It is hoped that results will be announced by mid of April.
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The 2016 winter meeting was held in Newcastle upon Tyne on 15-17th January. It started with a reception and dinner on the Friday evening, and the society joined with the Natural History Society of Northumbria for a lichen herbarium evening with a display of specimens and books from their collection.
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Our membership management system now has an online portal through which members can manage their own contact details and renew their subscriptions. Payments can be made by credit or debit card, and direct debits are also available (as well as cheques for those who prefer). The day to day running of this system has been transferred to a service provider, the Royal Society of Biology.
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Buellia asterella, the Starry Breck Lichen, has been accepted for inclusion in the IUCN Global Red List with a conservation status of Critically Endangered. This is the first British lichen to be included in the list.
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Earlier this month the South Yorkshire Biodiversity Research Group held a conference, Oliver Gilbert: A Life in Ecology, in Sheffield. Oliver had many interests including lichens. He was an active member of the BLS and author of the classic New Naturalist book on Lichens, published in March 2000.
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Erik Acharius (1757-1819) was Linnaeus's last student and the founder of modern systematic lichenology. Before his death in 2014, David Galloway found Acharius's personal, interleaved copy his book Lichenographiae suecicae Prodromus (1799) in the Manuscripts Department of the university library in Uppsala.
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Thanks to the Herculean efforts of Les Knight distribution maps for ALL the British species of lichens and lichenicolous fungi are now available within the species accounts for each taxon. We will update these maps when there are significant changes, and they will generally be more up to date and accurate than those on the NBN Gateway.
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An exhibition of lichen photographs by Northumberland photographer Iain Duncan has just opened in the main gallery and foyer of the Queen’s Hall, Hexham, and will be there until 22nd November 2014.
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The Caring for God's Acre project have just published a fabulous resource for schools to encourage them to get classes out exploring their local churchyards as part of their schoolwork.
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The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and British Lichen Society have made available a toolkit in which lichenologists can explore the consequences of climate change at a site-scale, for 382 lichen epiphyte species. A value of ‘environmental suitability’ can be compared for individual species, or across an assemblage of epiphytes, between the present-day and the 2050s and 2080s based on Met Office climate models.