#18: Kerry Knudsen - The Magic of Lichen

You’re gonna be liken this episode. Well, let me rephrase that - you’re going to like this episode about lichen.What’s a lichen? If you’ve hiked just about anywhere, you’ve probably seen one. They are colorful organisms that grow on rocks, tree branches, and even fence posts. Around where I live, I see lichens growing on people’s roofs, too!I called them organisms because they are complicated. Sometimes they are characterized as symbiotic relationships between a fungi and an algae. But it’s much more interesting than that.And there are few people better to help us learn about lichens and how to find them than Kerry Knudsen, a lichenologist at the University of Life Sciences in Prague.Kerry’s personal story is equally fascinating as lichens themselves. Kerry got started in lichens later in life after a health condition derailed a long career in construction. And he’s gone on to discover over 60 new lichen species that were previously undescribed, founded the lichen collection at the University of California, Riverside, and has 161 peer reviewed publications on ResearchGate and more elsewhere.So get ready to learn about lichens, how they live, what they do, how they propagate, how wildfire impacts them, and much more. So, as Allie Ward likes to say in her Entertaining Ologies podcast, despite my preparation and research, I had a lot of freedom to ask a smart person stupid questions, and I thank Kerry for his patience and detail in his answers. SHOW NOTESLinksAndre Breton - the founder of Surrealism kept a lichen collection just for the beauty and inspirationCalifornia Lichen SocietyRick Halsey of the California Chaparral Institute. See my past interview with Rick.Steven Levitt - University of Chicago economist who analyzed the ranching use of the Amazon rainforest. He had a podcast episode with his solution.Theodore Payne Foundation - Kerry mentioned working here for a periodUniv. of California Riverside HerbariumBooksA Field Guide to California Lichens - Stephen SharnoffMacrolichens of the Pacific Northwest - Bruce McCuneUsnea is a genus with over 600 species, and is difficult to identify in the fieldSupport Us On Patreon!Buy our Merch!Music: Spellbound by Brian Holtz MusicLicense (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-licenseArtist site: https://brianholtzmusic.com Discover the Jumpstart Nature Podcast - entertaining and immersive, it's the nature fix we all need.Check past Nature's Archive episodes for amazing guests like Doug Tallamy, Elaine Ingham, and Gabe Brown, covering topics from bird migration to fungi to frogs and bats!