Long-term data on the dynamics of lichen communities: Developing procedures for incorporating community data into iDigBio

Saxicolous lichens are a great system, analogous to the marine hard substrate, for studying community processes such as colonization, competition, and disturbance. Well . . . . maybe not so great. They grow slowly. Really slowly. However, they are amenable to long-term photographic studies. We used 32 years of images to quantify colonization, growth, and overgrowth rates of lichen species on rock surfaces. This require dealing with the evolution of photograph format and quality over this long time period, as well as figuring out how to put data for communities into Morphbank. This was slow, too!