Biodiversity in the North West: The Slime Moulds of Lancashire and Cumbria

About this book

The historical counties of Lancashire, Westmorland and Cumberland have a rich diversity of geology, landscape, vegetation and wildlife. This is an account of a group of fascinating organisms, the slime moulds, which are neither slimy nor moulds, and have been shuffled between the animal and plant kingdoms, neither to which they belong!

After a short introduction to the biology and ecology of slime moulds, the physical and ecological environment of present-day Lancashire and Cumbria is described. The main part of the book is a detailed catalogue of all the species ever recorded in the region. The records date back to the nineteenth century but are mostly concentrated in the last sixty years, up to the present. The book is a companion volume to The Slime Moulds of Cheshire, published in 2011 in the Biodiversity in the North West series.

The author, who is Visiting Professor of Environmental Biology and Emeritus Professor of Applied Science at the University of Chester, has studied slime moulds since 1957 and is a world authority on the group. He has published more than 200 papers on slime moulds and has produced the standard work on the British and Irish species, reprinted in 2020. He lived in Mold for nearly forty years but is now retired to the north-west Highlands of Scotland, where he continues to research the local fungi.

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