Checklist of the lichens and lichenicolous fungi of Sierra Nevada (Spain)

A checklist of lichens and lichenicolous fungi of Sierra Nevada (Granada, southeast Spain) is presented, fruit of the collecting field trip carried out by the Spanish Lichen Society (SEL), complemented with literature references. The authors identified 194 taxa (171 lichens and 23 lichenicolous fungi). As a result of these identifications, 46 lichens and nine lichenicolous fungi are reported for the first time in Sierra Nevada. To date, the catalogue includes 551 taxa (528 lichens and 23 lichenicolous fungi). We confirm both the scarce presence of terricolous lichens in the cryoromediterranean belt and the absence of alpine belt terricolous lichens.


Introduction
The characteristic situation of Sierra Nevada, which comprises the highest elevations in the Iberian Peninsula and the southernmost of the great European mountain ranges, has drawn the attention of botanists since the end of the 18th century. The first observations on its lichen flora date from 1804, with the visit of Simón de Rojas Clemente. A pioneer of his time, in addition to multiple floristic observations, Clemente built an altitudinal cliserie where he collected data on the vascular and lichen flora from the summit of Mulhacen to the sea level. It was probably the first built in Europe and with it, according to the author himself, "he intended to lay the foundations of Geographical Botany in Andalusia, which did not yet exist in any other European country".
Unfortunately, Clemente's data was never fully published, they remained unpublished for more than 60 years. Was Colmeiro (1863) who reinterpreted and partially published some of the Clemente's observations in the article "Tentativa sobre la liquenología geográfica de Andalucía" in 1863 and included the Clemente's lichenological citations in his "Enumeracion de las criptógamas de España y Portugal" in 1867. Clemente's work included the description of numerous new species that, due to the loss of a good part of their personal herbarium and the delay in their publication, have been almost impossible to recover. Many of the botanists who visited Sierra Nevada in the first half of the 19th century made reference to the lichen biota of the massif (e.g. Boissier 1845, cites 88 lichen species). Kunze (1846) published the list of species collected by Willkomm. However, we would still have to wait almost a century for a study specifically focused on lichenology on the whole of Sierra Nevada. The Rev. Fr. Longinos Navás, an entomologist also interested in cryptogams, completed a naturalistic field trip to reach Mulhacen summit in 1901. In addition to interesting entomological contributions, he provided a short list of lichens (Navás 1902). The first modern article dedicated to the lichens of the massif was made in 1934 by R. G. Werner .
In the second half of the century, the improvement of communications and the growing interest in lichenology multiplied the visits to Sierra Nevada of lichenologists such as Degelius (1966), Poelt (1969, Hertel (1967) or Wunder (1974), among others, who left a trail of scattered citations in the bibliography that mostly correspond to specific collections.
With the resurgence of lichenology in Spain in the 1970s, lichen studies in Sierra Nevada and their environment began to multiply, carried out by the universities of Murcia and Granada, which allowed us to acquire more precise knowledge on the lichen biota of the siliceous area of summits and its calcareous environment. To a large extent these works were promoted around the figure of Professor Llimona and his close collaborators. More recently, specialists in specific groups who have sought in the situation of the massif a unique locality for their collections have made progresses in the knowledge of many lichen genera.
The data we present here are a synthesis of the previous citations (Burgaz 2014) and the contribution of the identifications made by the members of the Spanish Lichen Society (SEL) from the material collected in the campaign carried out in September 2018.

Limits of Sierra Nevada
The complicated orography of the southeastern Iberian Peninsula makes difficult to establish a precise delimitation of Sierra Nevada. Geographically, it is usually considered that the massif occupies an area of more than 2000 km², organized around an anticline of about 80 kilometers in length, which runs in the E-W direction, between Alhama (Almería) and the depression of El Padul (Granada) to the west. Its width varies remarkably: 40 km in the western end, and about 15 Km in the eastern one.
Geographically, it is delimited to the north by the Guadix-Baza depression and the Baza range. To the east, through the headwaters of the Nacimiento and Andarax rivers. To the south, is delimited by the Guadalfeo basin and the Lujar and Contraviesa mountains. To the west through the Vega de Granada and the Lecrín valley. From a biogeographic point of view (Rivas-Martínez et al. 2017) its limits are more diffuse since the massif is in the eastern limit of the Betica Province in contact with the Murciano-Almeriense Province and participates in 4 sectors that they extend beyond the political limits in which the massif is demarcated. At its western end, the Sierra Nevada territory belongs to the Granadino-Almijarense sector, made up of calcareous-dolomitic materials, alpujárrides. The southern limit belongs to the Alpujarreño-Gadorense sector that contacts the Mediterranean Sea. This is lithologically more diverse although calcareous substrates predominate in it. The eastern end of the territory belongs to the Almeriense sector delimited, rather than by a change of substrate, by the appearance of a semi-arid ombroclimate. Finally, the Nevadense sector constitutes the central nucleus of Sierra Nevada, composed of the slate schists and launes of the nevado-filábride geological complex. The northern limit of the massif is composed by the sedimentary materials of the Guadix and Baza depressions belonging to the Guadiciano-Bastetano sector that is no longer considered as part of Sierra Nevada. Bioclimatically Sierra Nevada is the only massif in Europe where 5 bioclimatic belts are represented, from the thermo-to the cryomediterranean.
For this publication, we have considered the whole Sierra Nevada from a biogeographic perspective including some immediate territories in order to offer a coherent catalogue that includes the real biodiversity present in the area.

Material and methods
The list of taxa is alphabetically arranged nomenclaturaly according to the latest standards (Species Fungorum 2020, Roux et coll. 2020, Nimis & Martellos 2020 publications. Each taxon is followed by collections at the visited localities (see numbers in List 1). For taxons that represent a new appointment for Sierra Nevada, name of collectors, identificators and the herbarium number is given. Habitat abbreviatures appear in List 2.

Results
The following 46 lichens are new to Sierra Nevada: The prospection conducted by the authors was specifically directed to complete the checklist of the lichens and lichenicolous fungi of Sierra Nevada. As evidence of this, from the 194 identified taxa 55 were new to the previous catalogue. Of the new 46 lichens, 23 were saxicolous, 12 terricolous and muscicolous and 11 were epiphytes. Besides, the authors specifically searched for characteristic terricolous lichens from the alpine bioclimatic belt in the above-treeline localities (Loc. 1, Loc. 2, Loc. 3, Loc. 4 and Loc. 5). We highlight the poor diversity of terricolous lichens in this belt. We only found Catapyrenium cinereum, con-sidered as boreal-montane to artic-alpine (Nimis et al. 2018), Peltigera malacea, a circumpolar, arctic-alpine lichen and P. praetextata, that has a wide altitudinal range. None of the terricolous lichens characteristic of the alpine bioclimatic belt have been found (Nimis et al. 2018)  Schaer. var. vermicularis. We confirm the low presence of terricolous lichens in the cryoromediterranean belt and the absence of alpine belt terricolous lichens. This can be considered a distinctive feature between the European high mountains and the Mediterranean high mountains.