How to Know the Lichens (The Pictured Key Nature Series)

From Preface: "Lichens are known to most naturalists are unusual but somewhat mysterious plants. Part of this mystery lies in the fact that there are but few reliable books about lichens written for beginners. Many people collect lichens and are then frustrated when they try to put names on them. Books for identification have been so badly out of date, overly technical, or inaccurate that one has had little chance of correctly naming an unknown specimen. The first edition of How to Know the Lichens was prepared with the aim of filling this gap and it stimulated much interest in lichenology. Now, ten years later, a new edition is needed to incorporate the results of recent taxonomic research and scientific studies. Lichenology still lags far behind the higher plants and even mosses and fungi in terms of easily available reference works. In another sense this means that it is an exciting field because so many new discoveries can be made. Several more genera have been critically studied since 1969 and can now be identified with greater accuracy, including Alectoria and its segregate genus Bryoria, Collema, Hypogymnia, and the brown Parmlias and the genus Neofuscelia. As a result of these changes and an updating of other groups, 70 new entries have been added to the keys, bringing the total number of species treated to 427, many of them western lichens. The illustrations have been enlarged in many cases in the belief that a close-up at higher magnificaion is more useful for identification purposes than one at natural size. Another change is a tabulation of the genera and their characters before each major key section. In addition the genera are classified by family phylogenetically at the end of the book...."