Data:

Tree Location : 39°19'37.7"N 82°05'59.1"W

Lichen, probably something you don’t think about too much. Lichen grow on trees and rocks. They tend to be grey or green coin sized patches on whatever surface the attach themselves to. But what are they; they look like some form of plant or fungi. Well if you guessed either of those your actually right. Surprisingly lichen are actually two organisms in one. The fungus and algae work together in a process commonly referred to as symbiosis. Symbiosis is the interaction between two different organisms living in close physical association, typically to the advantage of both. Beatrix Potter, an English botanist, first speculated this. The fungi is bigger and gives the lichen most of its structure. Where the smaller part, the algae, is responsible for producing most of the energy for the duo, via photosynthesis just like any other plant. The roles that both the fungus and the algae contribute allow the lichen to live in a wide variety of places.

Lichen come in all shapes and sizes. However, there are three main types of lichen that are commonly identified. Crustose, or crusty, lichen are the flat spots you may most often see on rocks. They can look like spots scattered across whatever service they are on. Another type of lichen is the Foliose or leafy kind. This is most commonly found on tree bark, it is larger and looks like small leafs. Lastly there is the fructicose kind, or the shrubby kind. In our in class project, we are using lichen to asses air quality. The amount of lichen on a surface, in this case a tree, can often indicate quality of the air. As pollutants inhibit the growth of lichen. Also, being so fragile, and taking so long to grow, a spike in pollution will have a huge effect on the lichen population for us. Our group was assigned trees all over Ohio University’s campus. I have included coordinates and pictures of the tree I assessed. We took data more than 1 meter above the ground for accurate readings. We counted the colonies per quadrant, and than used a formula to get the standard deviation for the tree. My tree was on college green. The tree was fairly close to several streets. This is important because this means increased pollution when compared to a tree that would be in the middle of the woods for example. In this blog, you can see the results of my quadrant analyses. To collect this data, we used wooden or wire templates with four squares cut into them. We took data from the North, East, South, and West sides of the tree for an accurate average. I have also included pictures of the tree’s branches for species identification, as well as a general site picture. Our hope is by combining data, and looking at past data, we can get a general idea on the air quality in the area. We should also be able to see if there has been a decline or rise in pollution.

N:1,2,0,1

East: 0,1,1,1

South:0,2,0,1

West: 1,1,0,0

SD: 0.75

North: