Bryonora Poelt,
Type : Bryonora castanea (Hepp) Poelt [=Biatora castanea Hepp]
Description : Thallus crustose, to squamulose or fruticulose, often indistinct, amongst mosses, soil or detritus in alpine habitats. Prothallus indistinct. Photobiont green, Protococcoid. Ascomata apothecia, biatorine to lecanorine, sessile, red-brown to brown-black. Thalline exciple indistinct. Proper exciple very distinct, persistent, of swollen, anastomosing, reticulately branched, conglutinated hyphae in a gelatinous matrix, the cell lumina very narrow. Epithecium red-brown to brown. Hypothecium of strongly conglutinated hyphae, with photobiont cells below, pale-brown. Hamathecium of paraphyses, simple, apices thickened, strongly conglutinated. Asci 8-spored, with an I+ blue outer wall layer and a distinct, I+ blue tholus. Ascospores thick-walled, simple, to 1–6-septate, colourless, ellipsoidal to fusiform or cylindrical. Conidiomata pycnidia. Conidia colourless, bacillar. Chemistry, TLC−, or with norstictic, lobaric, usnic, isousnic or fatty acids (Poelt & Obermeyer 1991).
Bryonora, included in the family Lecanoraceae (Eriksson et al. 2004; Pennycook & Galloway 1994) is a genus of c. 16 taxa comprising 12 species and four infraspecific taxa (Poelt 1983; Holtan-Hartwig 1991; Poelt & Obermayer 1991; Øvstedal & Lewis Smith 2001), characterised by the clearly distinct, conglutinated tissues of the apothecia, and a restriction to alpine or high-alpine terricolous/muscicolous, "bipolar" habitats. Species occur in these habitats in Europe, Scandinavia, Iceland, Svalbard, Novaya Zemlya, Siberia, the Himalaya, North America and Antarctica, with a main area of speciation in the mountains of central Asia (Poelt 1983; Poelt & Obermayer 1991). One species is known from the mountains of the South Island and is an addition to the bipolar lichen mycobiota of New Zealand.
