Our Biodiversity Shorts are a series of webinars that delve into a range of natural history topics, with live discussion and tuition from an expert tutor. All webinars will be hosted on Zoom, and they will be approximately one hour long, including time for questions from participants.
Click on the topics below to learn more about each webinar, and book them by selecting one or all of the webinars at the bottom of this page. Please note that bookings close 1 working day before the webinar start time.
Coastal Lichens with Petra Vergunst
Date and time: 27th May 2025, 11:30am – 12:30pm
Rocky shores are an excellent habitat to start your lichen journey and what is more enjoyable than to spend a sunny summer afternoon identifying some of the yellow and orange coloured lichens on the seaside. The zonation of lichen communities on the basis of the relative influence of the tide further helps with identification, and reveals interesting stories about the way these species have adapted to the vagaries of the tides, invertebrate grazing and exposure to sun.
Petra Vergunst is a field ecologist specialised in lichens and bryophytes based in NE Scotland. To engage people with lichens and bryophytes and help with identification, she runs the website Scottish Lichens and facilitates the similarly-named Facebook group. Petra is passionate about biological recording as a means to monitor the quality of the environment and has done extensive surveys of woodland and forest, the heritage landscape and coastline of NE Scotland. An ecologist by training, she is interested in how land management, nutrient-enrichment and other forms of disturbance influence the presence (and absence), lifecycle and ecology of lichens.
You will receive an email the morning of the event with joining details and the webinar link. If you have not received an email 2 hours prior to the event, please email us at: [email protected]
After each webinar, course participants will be sent a link to the recording within one working week of it ending. This recording is accessible for 30 days after the recording link is made live.
Opportunities to attend this course
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Tue 27, May 2025 11:30 - 12:30
Coastal Lichens with Petra Vergunst
After each webinar, course participants will be sent a link to a webinar recording within one working week of it ending. This recording is accessible for 30 days after the event.
Click here to view all our upcoming Natural History courses.
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