Lichens of Lough Corrib

Project Summary

In this project we set out to geographically log, photograph, identify and chronicle the lichens on the northern islands of Lough Corrib.

We selected a series of islands in the north west of Lough Corrib for a number of reasons:
The islands are completely uninhabited except for some bird life.
The islands remain almost completely undisturbed by humans except for the occasional fishermen taking their lunch on the shores of some of these islands.
The islands all have some tree and shrub growing on them as well as having areas of exposed rock.
On our own occasional visits to the island we were struck by the colouring on the rocks and decided to investigate these unusual phenomenon.
We have the opportunity to visit the islands on a regular basis, depending on weather conditions and we thought that the lichens were unusual enough to merit further study.

We first visited a series of these islands in late May 2008. We made initial observations on the locations of a number of different lichens. At this stage we only noticed a number of white lichens on the rocks and green lichens on the trees. We noted what islands we proposed investigating in depth and waited for suitable weather conditions to plan further detailed visits.

Unfortunately the weather conditions during the summer of 2008 militated against these proposed detailed visits and it was not until November 29 and 30, over two days that we succeeded in detailing the substantial investigations.

We went to the islands, to identify the areas of specific interest on each island and to see which lichens appeared on the islands. Our first task was to identify the different types of lichen and how to class and identify them.

On the various islands we took photographs of the different lichens. As we moved on the islands we plotted our geo positions via satellite navigation using a standard TomTom device. We took notes of the different variations and colours of the lichens.