Spent a pleasant morning working with my research student on the lichens again (We've re-started the study; hopefully this summer we will not get flooded out).

We decided the best first move is to grab as many samples as we can get and begin identifying them. We've ID'd so far maybe 16 species. (I have no idea how many of those are strictly correct but they are as close as we can get with the resources at hand).

We've been using The Mason Hale book for a first pass (and no, I did not pay that much for my copy), and the big Brodo book for verification. (The Brodo book was a particularly inspired "I want this for Christmas" request a couple years ago).

(We need to verify both because the Hale book is older, and a lot of the names have changed, and also because the Brodo book tends to have more detailed descriptions. And better photographs. In fact, the photographs in the Brodo book are quite lovely - I had kept it as sort of a geekish coffee-table book until I started this project)

Lichens are challenging to identify and find information on because so few people study them. (And probably so few people study them in part because they're challenging to identify).

My goal is to maybe make a species checklist for this part of the world - at least of the bark and branch lichens - and publish it either in the POAS or in the Oklahoma Native Plant Society journal.

We also plan to do the abundance-survey; I think I'm going to have my student use that work for the independent research she needs to do next spring; if the project turns out well we could also publish that.

One thing I learned this morning about identification is how easy the "color" tests are - these are chemical tests you apply to the lichens to test for the presence of certain compounds in the lichen that allow you to separate different genera. I had been dissuaded from even trying this because someone (I don't know if they were misinformed or if they were deliberately trying to scare me off of the project) was all, "Oh, you have to macerate the lichen and boil it in the compound for a couple hours" and it turns out that it's actually a very simple indicator test - make up a dropper-bottle of the test solution, carve off a piece of the lichen (and scrape away the cortex if it's the medulla you need to test), and then drop the compound on there.

The first time we did the K test on one of the lichens - and saw it turn purple, the color that confirmed it was the species we thought it was - we both said, in unison, "Whoa...that's coooooool."

So it's fun. And while we may not have 100% correctly identified the species we have, we can do more work later (with other compounds we don't have - there are basically three different compounds, K, C, and P, that you use to test lichens) to verify. And maybe even find some Big Famous Person who Knows Lichens and send them off to him or her. (In my limited experience, Big Famous People in the "naturalist" type fields tend to be VERY nice and VERY helpful and VERY interested in working with people doing projects. That may not be true in every area of science but it seems that the field naturalists kind of look on each other with more of a kind fellow-feeling than, say, geneticists do. I suppose it's because field naturalists are less likely to 'scoop' each other on research projects or beat each other out for the big grants).