Towards a checklist of the lichens of the Alps

The Alps are one of the largest continuous natural areas in Europe, stretching approximately 1,200 kilometres across eight countries, and including fourteen national parks. The Alpine Convention emphasizes the importance of this area and encourages transnational research and conservation projects. Lichens as unique models of fungal symbioses with macroscopically recognizable, light-exposed individuals are important colonizers of rock, soil and plant material, and they are a dominant symbiotic life form of higher altitudes in the Alps. National checklists or catalogues exist for Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Slovenia and Switzerland. The compilation of a catalogue of the lichenized fungi of the Alps is a long overdue task and will enable us to compare, for instance, the genera or species diversity of the Alps with those of other mountain systems of the world. We have summarized the abundant but scattered baseline information on lichen biodiversity in the Alps, which will lead to a transnational inventory of all lichen taxa (c. 3,000), including data on their horizontal and vertical distribution and their ecology. This information will be of use for experts, decision-makers, and citizen scientists.