The mean annual temperature with a wide range is 18.5 °C and the mean annual precipitation is 220 mm but highly variable from year to year. The average annual insolation is very high at more than 3,000 h/year. The BCSs cover one third of the area and are dominated by different types of lichens.   2. Hochtor, Großglockner, Alps, JQ-EZ-05 Austria (47.0833333°, 012.8500000°). This high elevation site, with an altitude of 2,600 m a.s.l., is influenced by the severe Alpine climate with temperatures around −9 °C in

January and 3 °C in July and an annual mean of around −3.0 °C. The annual precipitation is around 2,000 mm/year GSK1210151A of which 70 % falls as snow. The BCSc are dominated by lichens together with mainly cyanobacteria and green algae, some bryophytes, and a few vascular plants.   3. Ruine Homburg, Gössenheim, Bavaria, Germany (50.0166667°, 009.8000000°). The climate in this area is warm temperate with an annual mean temperature of 9.2 °C and an annual precipitation of 600 mm. This anthropogenic influenced landscape is covered by a thin vegetation layer (dry grassland) and dominated by cryptogams.   4. Nature Reserve Gynge Alvar, Öland, Sweden (56.5421389°, 016.4783889°). This lowest elevation site is located on the island of Öland situated close to the SE coast of Sweden. With an annual mean precipitation

of 450 mm this is the driest area of the whole country. The mean temperature is around 6.5 °C and ranges from −2 °C in February to 17 °C in July. The PND-1186 mouse BSC dominated zones are covered with cyanobacteria, bryophytes and lichens with infrequent higher plants.   Methods DNA-amplification, primer-design, sequencing Total DNA was extracted from individual thalli by using the DNeasy Plant Mini

Kit (Qiagen) according to the manufacturer’s instructions. The PCR mix contained 0.5 units of GoTaq DNA polymerase, 0.2 nM of each of the four dNTPs, 0.3 μM of each primer (0.6 if degenerated) and about 1 ng genomic DNA. The internal transcribed spacer region (ITS) of the photobionts’ nuclear ribosomal DNA (Trebouxia sp. and Asterochloris sp.) and the chloroplast-encoded intergenic spacer psbJ-L (Trebouxia sp.) were amplified and sequenced with the primers described in Tables 1 and 2. Because of soil crust Ribonucleotide reductase related contaminations—mainly different eukaryotic algae—highly specific primers were developed for amplifying the target markers from Trebouxia sp. and Asterochloris sp. The primers psbF and psbR (Werth and Sork 2010) were used to amplify and sequence the cp-marker (psbL-J for Trebouxia sp.) from Antarctic samples that were already known to have Trebouxia photobionts (Ruprecht et al. 2012) and from own Trebouxia cultures. These sequences were aligned with relevant cp-regions of confirmed related cp-genomes from Genbank to design more specific primers.