The Miracle of Lichen

Dr. Steve Leavitt is a biology professor at Brigham Young University and Associate Director of the Monte L. Bean Life Science Museum, where he curates the museum’s “lichen herbarium.” His work centers on lichens—studying their diversity, evolution, and the roles they play in ecosystems across western North America. He combines fieldwork, lab studies, and DNA analyses to better understand species boundaries, discover new species, and track patterns of biodiversity in the Intermountain West and beyond. Steve also leads a long-term biomonitoring program that uses lichens as indicators of ecosystem health, anchored by more than 500 permanent study sites across wilderness areas throughout the Intermountain West. 

Leavitt Lichenology Lab

Publications

BYU Biology

A lichen is a colony of algae or cyanobacteria living interactively with fungus and bacteria in a mutual or symbiotic relationship, meaning everything gets something out of the relationship. But for Steve Leavitt, a lichen is a hotspot of diversity and an indicator of ecological health.  Steve is in charge of one of the largest lichen collections in North America at BYU where he teaches and directs the Life Science Museum. But most of all, Steve loves his research and being outside. 

Science Moab:  What are the threats to lichen diversity on the Colorado Plateau?

Leavitt:  So this is actually a pretty big deal.  they’ve actually sent some lichen into space and these things can survive really harsh conditions because when the conditions get really bad, they just basically turn off, shut down. And when they’re shut down, then they’re not really susceptible to damage the same way as active organisms. So they’re really resilient to some pretty intense cosmic radiation or living in a pure vacuum of space and no oxygen. 

But at the same time, when you think about a lichen as this whole community of organisms, If you change the conditions enough that one of those essential organisms can’t survive, the whole thing fails. So really the biggest issue right now with lichens is changing climate.

A study just came out a couple of weeks ago looking at some of these alpine adapted lichens, and they’ve modeled how distributions change over time and typically we think they’ll just move up the mountains to cooler habitats that match the habitats that they were adapted to as climate changes. Ultimately, the way that their distribution changes with the changing climate is really dynamic and almost every single of the 250 plus lichens that they modeled, their distributions became really narrow with changing climate or became completely non-existent. So as climate changes, the modeling suggests that almost without fail, the distributions will become much smaller or non-existent in the future. 

So they don’t seem to be as adaptive as you might hope in terms of a changing environment. 

Science Moab:  Can anything be done short of reversing climate change? 

Leavitt:  I think what we can do is go out and enjoy and think about what it takes to be an organism or life to survive on earth and try to appreciate those complexities. And think, okay, this resilient thing that can survive space is still susceptible to these changing climatic conditions and appreciate what it does and those dynamic roles, and try to use that to broaden our perspective of how we engage with the world in a way that somehow values these things that are so tough and so resilient and at the same time.

Science Moab:  Can you explain how you are using lichen in your research to assess air quality? 

Leavitt:  With the de designation of wilderness areas, part of that includes the federal mandate to assess air quality in these wilderness areas. one of the ways that the federal government has opted to assess air quality in wilderness areas is using lichens as indicators of ecological health.

This is work that was established probably in the eighties here in the Intermountain West by a lichenologist named Larry St. Clair at BYU and I became a part of this and we now have a network of over 500. Reference sites across wilderness areas all throughout the Intermountain region from Southern Arizona up to Montana and from Colorado West into the Great Basin and Idaho, that we have these reference sites that we go out and we collect lichens and we assess those lichens for potential pollutants that have been deposited on the lichen itself. Then we also look at the diversity of indicator species, so we can get this really big picture at a broad scale of air quality across the Intermountain regions, and particularly in wilderness areas. 

Science Moab:  Can you explain what has happened in terms of genetics that has advanced the study of lichen? 

Leavitt:  One of the things that really has opened up our world of understanding and diversity is getting genetic information. Twenty, thirty, or forty years ago that just wasn’t available.

Now we can use genetic information to help us really characterize that diversity in brand new ways that we’re just practically impossible to do. And as we look at genetic diversity, it tells us that what we thought was the diversity is a huge underestimate. The range of variation, the range of processes that occur that are reflected by their genomes or DNA makeup.

So a lot of my work uses or utilizes genetic information as one of the tools to help characterize what’s happening. it’s just like this really cool opportunity that just happens to be at the time that I’m here, that I’m studying lichens and it’s happened to open up a brand new perspective of how we see lichen diversity.