April 6 from 9:00-11:00 via Zoom
Lichens
Nastassja Noell
The program will provide an introduction to lichens -- general biology, ecology, morphology; Northern Arkansas lichens -- lichen habitats and common lichens, regional bioindicator research (air quality, climate change, forest health); and if time, an ID session where folks can bring macrolichens that they'd like to ID together, going through a key together as a class.
Nastassja (Nuh-staah-sha) Noell is a lichenologist that lives in the Smoky Mountains in western North Carolina. Her lichenological work has taken her around the country, including the Channeled Scablands of Eastern Washington State, the Mid-Atlantic Coastal Plain. and most recently the Great Basin Desert and the North American Alpine. She's the co-author of Delmarva Lichens: An Illustrated Manual (Lendemer & Noell 2018) and the author of the chapter Radical Lichenology in the book Radical Mycology (McCoy 2016), and several research articles. Her work with lichens revolves around a central theme of biological narratives that root us in time, place, and within ourselves and our communities. She sees lichens as mascots for the 21st century: living examples of embodied mutualistic symbioses.