The purpose of this work is to enable identification of a group of lichens and associated fungi that remain incompletely known in most regions.  Many species occur on multiple continents and significant range-extending discoveries are frequent, such that keys to locally known species would almost certainly be incomplete. Therefore this work attempts to span all taxa that are in use in contemporary literature (roughly since the mid 1960’s) world-wide.

This is an on-going project; the keys are not meant to serve as final word on the determination of a specimen.  I recommend that all determinations be followed up by consulting additional published taxonomic works or verification by an expert in Calicioid taxonomy.

The keys and other content are also expected to change over time.  To make these changes easier to maintain, I have now converted the entirety of this to a database-driven e-book.  Although I hope it is not apparent to the casual reader, text for each section comes from fields in a database.  The keys themselves have each step entered as a database record and organized by a heirarchical sorting system such that numbering and nesting is automated and can quickly be added to, or re-arranged.  Each species and each photo are also database entries helping to maintain a regular format as well as accomodate reuse and rearrangement automatically.  Let me know if any of this catches your curiosity... particularly the keys. I've been looking for tools that might work nicely this way for a long time and finally jumped in to do it myself.  Others might really like to take advantage of this method.