Caloplaca is a lichen genus comprising a number of distinct species. Members of the genus are commonly called firedot lichen, jewel lichen. gold lichens, "orange lichens", but they are not always orange, as in the case of C. albovariegata. The distribution of this lichen genus is worldwide, extending from Antarctica to the high Arctic. It includes a portion of northern North America and the Russian High Arctic. There are about thirty species of Caloplaca in the flora of the British Isles. A new species of Caloplaca, C. obamae, the first species to be named in honor of Barack Obama, was discovered in 2007 on Santa Rosa Island in California and published in March 2009.

Taxonomy

Caloplaca was circumscribed in 1860 by Theodor Magnus Fries. Until relatively recently, Caloplaca was one of the largest genera of lichen-forming fungi, with more than 500 species. Since the advent of molecular phylogenetics, the formerly polyphyletic genus has been split into more than 30 smaller, monophyletic genera after many publications by Ukrainian lichenologist Sergey Kondratyuk and colleagues.

List of species

List of Caloplaca species

Gallery