Lichens can be good indicators of air quality as well as examples of the complexity of symbiosis: organisms living intimately together in a mutually beneficial way.  Sarah Thorne developed a science lesson involving students surveying of lichens in her school woods during a contract with the Forest Service in the White Mountain National Forest and can be accessed on the Forest Service web site.

The project that Sarah worked with to develop this lesson has been published in The Bryologist (Cleavitt et al. 2015) and as a publicly available General Technical Report (Dibble et al. 2017).  Sarah also published an article in The Science Teacher (Thorne 2017).  If you would like to explore lichens with your class, but need a lichen identification lesson.  Please contact Nat Cleavitt at nlc4@cornell.edu.