MEDITERRANEAN LICHENS ONLINE

In the frame of a project of the OPTIMA Commission for Lichens, a work space has been created on the Internet for the compilation of a checkl ist of Mediterranean lichens. The World Wide Web now offers quick acce ss to the lichen checklists of several countries, and facilitates the coordination of future work through a common format of data presentati on. As a first step, the checklists were placed on the Web as plain te xt files, except for the lichen data from Slovenia, which are organize d in a relational database. Placing new information on the Web is equi valent to a kind of publication, which raises some issues which need b eing discussed.