Actinoplaca is a small genus of lichen-forming fungi in the family Gomphillaceae. The genus is foliicolous, meaning its species grow on the surface of living leaves in humid tropical forests, and has been recorded from Central and South America and tropical Africa. The genus produces distinctive spherical structures on the thallus surface, now understood to be a type of asexual reproductive structure called '''', which were among the first such structures ever described in lichens.
GENUS
via GBIF · CC0
Actinoplaca is a small genus of lichen-forming fungi in the family Gomphillaceae. The genus is foliicolous, meaning its species grow on the surface of living leaves in humid tropical forests, and has been recorded from Central and South America and tropical Africa. The genus produces distinctive spherical structures on the thallus surface, now understood to be a type of asexual reproductive structure called '', which were among the first such structures ever described in lichens.
==Taxonomy==
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).