Tools and Chemicals

NWL does not endorse particular businesses. This list is a response to repeated requests for sources for tools and lichen reagents. Additional sources are welcome.

Lichen Curation Materials and Methods

• Viewpoints, tips, and sources on lichen curation materials.

Tools and Chemicals

• Carbide-tipped rock chisels, UV lamps, rock hammers, Hastings triplet hand lenses: Miners Inc, 800-824-7452. Email: sales@minerox.com -- Not sure Miners Inc is still functioning. Chisels also available from Trow and Holden Co.  The 3/8" (10 mm) diam straight chisel looks perfect.
• Cordless angle grinders with diamond blades. For example, Bosch cordless angle grinder GWS 10.8V-76. And small, thin blades, Kurstol 3"/75 mm tile diamond. Use outside for trimming specimens off of fatter rocks -- not inside, too much dust that you don't want to breathe. Battery lasts surprisingly long. Softer rocks cut very easily and hard rocks slower but effective. Best not use at field sites so you don't leave unnatural looking cut marks.
• Good quality hand-held plug-in UV lamp with short-wave and long-wave options, performance superior to LED-type UV lamps: UVP 95-0021-12 Model UVGL-25 Compact Split Tube UV Lamp, 254/365nm Wavelength, 115V, currently (May 2017) available through amazon.com for about $220. These are made by UVP in Upland, California.
  
• Hastings triplet hand lenses, UV lamps, many kinds of field equipment: Forestry Suppliers, 800 647 536. See more on hand lenses below.
• Lichen candelaris hand lenses with built-in dual LEDs,10X, 14X, and 20X triplets, aplanatic, achromatic. Erich Zimmerman. See the fact sheet posted by the Bryological and Lichenological Association for Central Europe or contact Erich for details. Made in Switzerland. This is the Rolls Royce of hand lenses, both in quality and price (over 5 times the price of a typical high quality hand lens). Don't even think of buying this if you habitually lose things in the field.
• PD reagent (para-phenylenediamine) - Photographers' Formulary, PO Box 950, Condon MT 5982.
  <formulary@blackfoot.net>. In their 2019 catalog, this was available at $7 for 10 g; also available in larger quantities.
• Ceramic spot plates used for spot tests can be purchased from scientific supply places, but they are unnecessarily expensive. You can use any ceramic or glass object, even a simple microscope slide. But if you use clear glass, you should put it over a white card. If you know a potter, they can make a flat plate a few inches square using white porcelain clay, make a series of smooth depressions with a finger, then fire it with a clear glaze. If someone wants to make and sell these, we can list them as a source here.
• Spot test poster has a flow chart to identify possible substances based on spot tests for common lichen substances. Photos of example reactions for each test are connected by a logical order for the tests. Order from wildblueberrymedia.net.
• Dropper bottles can also be purchased from science supply places. We have heard that you can also get them from pharmacists. Try to get small ones with brown glass. (The brown reduces the photo-degradation of C reagent, which can happen very quickly if you work in a sunny window). You can also just tape over a clear bottle to make it opaque, but brown glass is nice because you can see in it.
• Forceps. It's great to have a nice pair of superfine but strong forceps (tweezers). Cheap ones are easy to come by, as are cheap imitations of good ones. Based on recommendations that surfaced on the Bryonet listserver, one supplier of good forceps is BioQuip #4524, around $20 (sorry, now out of business) One person has used Swiss Rubis model 4A-SA, and found them to be great; source was uncertain. A cheap alternative, untested by us, are the #4 forceps at https://ecologysupplies.com/. Other people sound quite happy with relatively inexpensive tweezers, such as Erem EROP5SAV Anti-Acid, Micro-Point Tweezers, available from Fry's Electronics, currently for $6.
• Spear-point probe is also available from BioQuip (4754 or 4755, handle: #4753; sorry, BioQuip went out of business).
• Lichen color chart. If you are wondering what a lichenologist means by "yellow" or "red", this color chart poster should help. Beginners often struggle with color terms as applied by lichenologists in descriptions and keys. For example, usnic acid gives a distinctive yellowish tinge to lichens, which is recognized by all lichenologists, but initially that yellow tinge can be hard to discern in comparison to the wide range in subtle tones displayed by lichens. The poster also provide an attractive and interesting visual display of the spectrum of colors seen in lichens.  Order from wildblueberrymedia.net.

More on Hand Lenses

The following quote is from Jerry Jenkins, Northern Forest Atlas Project, Jerrycreejenkins@gmail.com, as given on Bryonet, May 7, 2026:

Here is my current list of favorite lenses.      

For scanning with a large field and good ergonomics, not having to bend over so far, the B&L 3.5X and the Peak 3x. Both excellent optically, and great for use with a flashlight on dark days. The B&L is cheaper, but I find the Peak easier to use.

For students and beginners on a budget, the Triplet 21mm-10x from ASC. Excellent optical quality from center to a few mm from edges, then falls off, so the whole 21 mm isn't really useful. Would be too much to ask in a 10x. Wide field, great price. I’ve ordered the 10X Hasting from Amazon that Terry recommended. Will test and report.

For professional field use, the B&L 7X, my favorite all-purpose lens for many years, the B&L 10X, and B&L 14X. As Dave noted, the B&L 20X is too tiny (8 mm) to be useful. Small lenses are dimmer and hard to keep lined up with your eye. The 7, 10, and 14X B&Ls are great lenses, well made and long lasting, and priced reasonably at $55 to $65.

Also for professional field use, the Iwamoto 10X and 20X: relatively wide lenses (I measure 15 mm and 14 mm, with Japanese calipers to be fair), great optics. On paper, they look to have wider fields than the B&Ls of the same nominal power, but I am not sure this is correct. Based on the measured focal length, the Iwamoto 10X has a strength of 27 diopters, comparable to the B&L 7X (29 diopters) rather than the B&L 10X. The Iwamoto 20X has a strength of 50 diopters, a bit less than the B&L 14X (57 diopters). If these comparisons are accurate, then fields of the Iwamoto lenses are comparable to those of the B&L lenses of similar strength, the optics of similar quality, and the cost half or a third as much.

It is worth noting here that while the Iwamoto “20X" is 4 mm wider than the B&L 14X of similar strength, its barrel is 6 mm longer and so the field is similar.

And that’s it for now. It’s worth noting that at present I don’t have any lenses with useful diameters, say 11 mm or more, who diopter strength suggests that they are truly 20X, and whose image quality is acceptable. If you do, please let me know. A true 20x should focus the sun’s image on a piece of paper about 12 mm from the center plane of the lens, and likely will set it on fire.

Online Mapping Tools

• Google Earth -- Extremely useful for obtaining geographic coordinates and elevations. This is a free download. Just type in Google Earth into your browser search window.
• Google Maps -- Click the "Maps" heading in the Google search page. This is a handy companion to Google Earth. In particular, try the "terrain" checkbox under the "More" heading. The main drawback to Google Maps and Google Earth is the fairly small database of searchable names.
• Google maps lat/long tool on crustose.net
• Geographical names in Canada
• Geography Network
• Microsoft TerraServer-USA
• If you want to do more serious mapping, ESRI's ArcGIS is the standard, but if you are on a tight budget, you might try QGIS, which is an open-source full-featured GIS program. Tom Carlberg pointed out a number of its attributes: 1. It's *free*. 2) It imports and exports .kml files for Google Earth (and many other file types). 3) With some web browsing, you can add ESRI satellite imagery. 4) It reprojects on the fly, for more file formats, and does a great job of that. 5) The user interface is difficult to use, especially if you are used to ArcMap, and especially in the page layout module. 6) The online support community is magnificent. 7) Scripting is more accessible than ArcMap.
  

Microphotography

• Micro-Tech-Lab and B&H Photo sells quality adapters for putting your digital camera on either a photo tube on a scope or an eyepiece on a scope. Some people hand hold a camera to the eyepiece, but your results will be much better and more consistent if you buy an adapter. These are not cheap, but life is short, and the pleasures of microphotography are many.
• Lighting. Realistic colors are achieved by setting the white balance of your camera. The type lighting will also be important. For use under the dissecting scope, LED lights are long lasting and inexpensive but currently have uneven spectra, causing overemphasis of some colors (commonly green and violet), even after setting the white balance. Halogen lamps are more expensive and generate a lot of heat, but have a more continuous spectrum and provide more realistic colors in photography.
• PhotoShop is a top-quality but expensive program for image editing. A free open-source alternative with a very large number of features is Gimp. Another open-source image editing program is ImageJ,  from the National Institute of Health. Tom Carlberg writes that auto image corrections look pretty good. If you photograph through the eyepiece of your scope, like he does, and include the reticle, you can set the scale and use the program for measuring, and also add a scale bar to the image. The native file format is .tif rather than .jpg.
• If you have found other solutions that work well, send them to me and I will add them to the list.