Protoblastenia is a genus of lichens in the family Psoraceae. It was originally circumscribed by Alexander Zahlbruckner in 1908 as a section of genus Blastenia. J. Steiner promoted it to generic status in 1911.
Protoblastenia is a genus of lichens in the family Psoraceae. It was originally circumscribed by Alexander Zahlbruckner in 1908 as a section of genus Blastenia. J. Steiner promoted it to generic status in 1911.
==Taxonomy and diversity== A 2025 revision of Finnish Protoblastenia, based on morphology and nuclear ITS rDNA sequences, showed that the genus is more diverse than had previously been recognised. The study accepted 20 species in Finland, including 16 species newly described there: P. arupii, P. borealis, P. compressa, P. dolomitica, P. ekmanii, P. fennoarctica, P. minuta, P. oulankaensis, P. pseudocompressa, P. pseudoterricola, P. remota, P. rikkinenii, P. saanaensis, P. timdalii, P. violacea, and P. westbergii. Many of these taxa were found to be semi-cryptic, with only slight average morphological differences between species, so some specimens cannot be identified reliably without molecular data.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).