ARPHA Proceedings 6: 37-42, doi: 10.3897/ap.e126131
Lichens and air quality: a new citizen science approach
Stefano Martellos‡, Sebastiano Andreatta§, Tania Contardo|, Stefano Loppi¶‡ University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy§ Natural History Museum of Verona, Verona, Italy| University of Brescia, Brescia, Italy¶ University of Siena, Siena, Italy
Corresponding author: Stefano Martellos ( martelst@units.it ) © Stefano Martellos, Sebastiano Andreatta, Tania Contardo, Stefano Loppi. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Citation:
Martellos S, Andreatta S, Contardo T, Loppi S (2024) Lichens and air quality: a new citizen science approach. ARPHA Proceedings 6: 37-42. https://doi.org/10.3897/ap.e126131 |  |
Abstract
Citizen science has been widely adopted in monitoring air quality by indexes of lichen diversity. Since the identification of lichens is challenging, volunteers are often involved in adopting simplified sampling protocols, which require identification at a higher level than the species, or the use of morpho-types, or colors. In Italy, a simple citizen science protocol for monitoring air quality with lichens by involving schools has been successfully tested, and will be replicated at the national level.
Keywords
anthropic pressure, biomonitoring, identification, schools, urban ecosystems.