Eva Barreno

Eva Barreno Rodríguez (born 5 December 1950) is a Spanish botanist and lichenologist, and emeritus professor of botany at the University of Valencia. She is known for research on lichen symbiosis and diversity, particularly her demonstrations of multiple coexisting green-algal partners in Ramalina farinacea, as well as for helping to build modern Spanish lichenology. In 2020 the journal Symbiosis issued a Festschrift to mark her seventieth birthday.

Career and research

Barreno was born in Madrid and has longstanding ties to Asturias. As a stand-out biological sciences student at the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM), she approached Salvador Rivas-Martínez in 1972 and joined the Madrid school of geobotany; early colleagues included Ana Crespo, , Manuel Costa, José Luis Pérez-Cirera and Carlos Arnáiz. She soon gravitated towards lichens and, together with Crespo and , broadened the scope of Spanish lichenology.

Her first university posts at the UCM were in the Faculties of Biology (1973–1977) and Pharmacy (from 1977). A short but productive stint at the Autonomous University of Madrid (1983–1985) followed, where she began building a cohort of lichen researchers that included her first doctoral student, Víctor Jiménez Rico. She later took the Chair of Botany at the University of Valencia, where by 2020 she had supervised 16 doctoral theses and 29 undergraduate dissertations.

Early study visits to Hannes Hertel at the Botanische Staatssammlung München honed her approach to difficult lecidioid groups and to collection curation and nomenclature; she subsequently maintained close contact with Josef Poelt and Antonín Vězda. During this 1970s period she published on Spanish lichens, including the description of Buellia follmannii from Madrid's gypsum strata and a floristic–ecological survey of lichens on central Iberian sedimentary rocks; her 1975 doctorate treated terricolous lichens of the Madrid region.

A long-running thread began with that led to vegetation and bioindication projects in the Canary Islands and to Barreno's broader Macaronesian biogeography work. She has also led extensive collecting campaigns in Spain and abroad; repeated visits (1995–2005) to the United States Forest Service laboratories in Riverside, California fostered collaborations with Patrick J. Temple and Andrzej Bytnerowicz, and she later worked with Thomas H. Nash on the Sonoran Desert flora project.

Her group's work with Ramalina farinacea helped shift thinking about lichen symbiosis from a single- model to more complex, multi-partner systems. In 2011 they showed that two distinct Trebouxia lineages co-exist within the same thalli and differ in physiological optima, suggesting functional complementarity under changing conditions.

Cited literature