Translocation of bryocaulon and lung lichens in the north of Sakhalin Region, Russia

Summary

Two rare lichens, the fruticose Bryocaulon pseudosatoanum and the leafy Lobaria pulmonaria, grow in old-growth larch and fir forest on Sakhalin Island in Russia's Far East, threatened there by logging, fire and habitat disturbance. When Sakhalin Energy planned a gas compressor station on a 0.04-hectare patch of forest supporting both species, the company weighed leaving the lichens in a protected buffer zone against translocating them to similar habitat elsewhere, and after a 2013 study of the population and its microclimate, chose translocation as the option better able to reduce long-term risk while meeting international biodiversity safeguard standards. In 2016, following a permit from Russia's federal nature oversight service, the team moved 76 Bryocaulon and 26 Lobaria subpopulations to a carefully matched recipient site by cutting and transplanting whole branch fragments carrying the lichen thalli, a method chosen because it preserves the natural substrate rather than the thalli alone. A first year of monitoring in 2017 tracked 100 translocated and three native subpopulations, finding 100 percent survival for Lobaria and about 74 percent for the more brittle, easily damaged Bryocaulon, with two subpopulations lost to wind at a secondary site. The project rates itself partially successful, noting that reliable conclusions about long-term survival will need three to five years of further monitoring, and that Bryocaulon's fragile growth form may make it inherently harder to translocate than Lobaria.