Climate change fosters the decline of epiphytic Lobaria species in Italy

Similarly to other Mediterranean regions, Italy is expected to experience dramatic climatic changes in the coming decades. Do to their poikilohydric nature, lichens are among the most sensitive organisms to climate change and species requiring temperate-humid conditions may rapidly decline in Italy, such in the case of the epiphytic Lobaria species that are confined to humid forests. Our study, based on ecological niche modelling of occurrence data of three Lobaria species, revealed that in the next decades climate change will impact their distribution range across Italy, predicting a steep gradient of increasing range loss across time slices. Lobaria species are therefore facing a high ext…