Project:

Lichen Biodiversity of Long Island Parks in Response to Urbanization

Students:

Rylan Baxter, Krystopher Simon

School:

St. Dominic High School, Nassau

Mentors:

Pamela Shanley

Abstract:

Lichens are a very important type of organism that lives on trees and rocks and is composed of fungi and algae that are in a symbiotic relationship together. Lichen are an important bioindicator that since pollution in the ecosystem grows lichen are adversely affected. We hypothesize that certain parks will have a higher biodiversity of lichens compared to others due to air quality from the surrounding effects such as cars, industrial areas and people. Our objective is to assess the biodiversity of lichen and then use Simpson’s Biodiversity Index to assess how pollution in the ecosystem damaged overall biodiversity. For our collection method we will extract one sample of lichen from every tree in a 144 square meter quadrat. To extract lichen we will wet it and then use a knife to scrape the lichen off the tree. We will use Chelex to isolate the DNA then perform PCR using ITS primers. Finally, we will send our amplicons off for sequencing to determine which species were present in eac

Poster:

Team samples: