Chroodiscus is a genus of leaf-dwelling lichens in the family Graphidaceae. These lichens form thin, smooth crusts directly on living leaves and are characterized by distinctive star-shaped fruiting bodies that split into triangular segments, with centres ranging from grey to bright scarlet-red depending on their chemical composition. The genus is found throughout tropical regions worldwide, growing in the shaded understory of rainforests from lowland areas to mountain cloud forests, where they serve as sensitive indicators of undisturbed forest conditions.
GENUS
via GBIF
Chroodiscus is a genus of leaf-dwelling lichens in the family Graphidaceae. These lichens form thin, smooth crusts directly on living leaves and are characterized by distinctive star-shaped fruiting bodies that split into triangular segments, with centres ranging from grey to bright scarlet-red depending on their chemical composition. The genus is found throughout tropical regions worldwide, growing in the shaded understory of rainforests from lowland areas to mountain cloud forests, where they serve as sensitive indicators of undisturbed forest conditions.
==Taxonomy==
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).