Lichens from the Colombian Amazon: 666 Taxa Including 28 new Species and 157 New Country Records Document an Extraordinary Diversity

Colombian Fungal Diversity: Untapped Potential for Diverse Applications

“…Out of a total of 192 departmental records corresponding to 157 new species and new records added to the Catalogue, most correspond to the departments of Amazonas (59), Caquetá (45), Guainía (24), Guaviare (13), and Putumayo (11), all partly or completely within the Amazon region and making up nearly 80% of all records. This is largely the result of the continued, systematic collection efforts by the Instituto SINCHI, spearheaded by the late Dairon Cárdenas-López, who sadly passed away in early 2022 [31]. Likely, additional collection efforts in the Amazon region will reveal further new records and even species, and similar efforts in the understudied Pacific and Orinoco regions should increase the total of lichenized species known well beyond the estimate of 3600 species made by Lücking et al [35].…”

“…Understanding the drivers of and threats to lichen diversity is crucial for further assessment of the Colombian lichen biota, as they continue to be an important component of environmental impact assessments. In the recent Catalogue, Moncada et al [18] reported a total of 2670 lichenized species, but since then, 157 further taxa have been added, including 38 species new to science and 119 new records for the country [22,[24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. Of these, 154 belong to the Ascomycota.…”

“…Notably, including data from environmental impact assessments considerably increased the number for the Caribbean region, making it the second best known after the Andean region. The 38 new species and 119 new country records added since then substantially change this picture, as most of these originate from the Amazon region, largely based on a study performed by Lücking et al [31]. Consequently, the Amazon now represents the second-best-known region in terms of its lichen biota after the Andean region.…”

Taxonomy and new distributional records of corticolous manglicolous microlichens in Bangrin Marine Protected Area, Philippines

“…Phylogenetic analysis in 2018 indicates that there are 271 Graphis species in the Graphidaceae core group. However, several Graphis species have been recently discovered in Brazil (Aptroot, Lücking & da Silva Cáceres, 2023;de Oliveira Junior et al, 2020), the Colombian Amazon (Lücking et al, 2023), and Thailand (Motta, Amortegui, Moncada & Lücking, 2019;Weerakoon, Aptroot, Lücking, Arachchige & Wijesundara, 2019).…”

Three new Pyrenula species with 3-septate ascospores with red or orange oil when over-mature (Ascomycota, Pyrenulales, Pyrenulaceae) from China

“…Since then, many new species of Pyrenula have been described and the genus now comprises ca. 238 species ( Aptroot 2012 , 2021 ; Aptroot et al 2018 ; Ingle et al 2018 ; Miranda-González et al 2022 ; Mishra et al 2022 ; Lücking et al 2023 ; Soto-Medina et al 2023 ), of which 41 species have so far been found in China ( Aptroot 2012 , 2021 ; Wang et al 2018 ; Fu et al 2018 , 2019 ; Wei 2020 ; Xie et al 2021 ).…”