A new lichen species for the country found in Buda-Kashalyova district
Employees of the Mycology Laboratory, during an inventory of fungal and lichen flora in the Republican Biological Reserve "Buda-Kashalyova", found a new lichen species for Belarus — Chaenothecopsis oregana Rikkinen, reported the Institute of Experimental Botany of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus.
The find was made in an oxalis oak forest on European spruce resin.
This species was first described by Finnish scientists in 2003 in North America — in the American state of Oregon. At that time, it was found on grand fir (Abies grandis) resin.
Later, the lichen began to be found in Europe as well: Switzerland (2010), Spain (2011), Latvia (2024), and Estonia (2025). As of 2026, about 20 locations of this species are known worldwide, with most of them located in the USA.
In 2020, Chaenothecopsis oregana was included in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species as a vulnerable species (category VU).
The peculiarity of the Belarusian find is that in the "Buda-Kashalyova" reserve, about 400 individual fruiting bodies of the lichen were discovered on spruce resin. This is one of the largest known populations of this species in the world.
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