The first botanical inventory of Iran, undertaken between 1850 and 1860 in the Transcaucasian and Hyrcanian regions by Buhse (1860), included 28 lichen species. The valuable collections made by Haussknecht (Germany) between 1865 and 1870 were partially studied by Rabenhorst (1870). Additional collections, made by several botanists such as Kotschy (Austria), Stapf (Austria), Strauss (Germany) and Bornmüller (Germany), are deposited in various herbaria in Europe, particularly Geneva (Switzerland) and Vienna (Austria). Some Iranian specimens were studied by Krempelhuber (1867), Müller (1892), Steiner (1986, 1910, 1916), Gyelnik (1931) and Szatala (1940, 1957). The lichen collections made by A. B. Shelkovinkov on his visit to northern Iran in 1916, examined by Oxner (1946), show that the bulk of collecting sites were in Kurdistan in the west or northwest of Iran and only single species were reported from Gilan and East Azerbaijan provinces.

    A large number of lichen specimens were collected during the monumental Flora Iranica project coordinated by Karl Heinz Rechinger (Austria), who visited Iran for the first time in 1937 (Lack 1987), but no precise information for the dates of his lichen collecting in Iran are provided. Szatala (1940, 1954, 1957) and many other lichenologists, such as Josef Poelt and his students from the University of Graz (Poelt 1970, Mayrhofer & Poelt 1979), have investigated Rechinger's collections from the provinces of Tehran, Golestan, Mazandaran, Semnan and Khorassan. 

Specimens collected by Per Wendelbo (Norway) in 1959 were examined by Weber (1964). During a Finnish expedition to West-Central Asia in 1972, some Iranian lichens, mainly from the provinces of West Azerbaijan, East Azerbaijan, Tehran, Mazandaran, Golestan, North Khorassan and Razavi Khorasan, were  collected by Pertti Uotila (Helsinki). Details of the Uotila collections are to be found in Sohrabi and Sipman (2007), a study dealing with lichenized fungi of Golestan National Park. During 1972 and 1974, another Finnish botanist, Reino Alava from University of Turku, collected a large number of specimens, mostly from the provinces of Zanjan, Markazi and Lorestan, Mazandaran and Tehran; details of these are to be found in Seaward et al. (2008).

Small collections were made by Riedl (1979), Probst in 1970, Breckle and Bhadrasa in 1977 (see Poelt & Obermayer 1990) and Lambinon in 1976 (see Ferraro et al. 2001), and some of the valuable collections made by Soják in 1973 were incorporated into the important exsiccatae prepared by Vězda between 1974-1980 which were distributed to many herbaria worldwide.

    In 1991-1993, for the first time, an Iranian student M. Karamudini (the first M.Sc. student on Iranian lichenology) began to pay attention to the lichens of Iran by writing a small dissertation pamphlet on high altitude lichens north of Tehran (Dianatnejhad and Karamudini 1993). Further preliminary studies during 1999-2003 were undertaken by Zokaie (Zokaei & Khazai 1999, Zokaei & Abedi 2000), and Zokaei (2002, 2003) and his students at the University of Ferdossi reported lichens in their studies mostly in the surroundings of the city of Mashhad.

In 1999-2003, the author, during bachelor degree studies at the University of Agricultural Science and Natural Resources of Gorgan, started to intensively collect lichens from different parts of Iran (see visited localities). The material he collected is deposited in his private herbarium (see collection) and partly published in the following papers: Seaward et al. (2004, 2008), Sohrabi (2005a, 2005b), Sohrabi and Orange (2006), Ahti and Sohrabi (2006), Sohrabi and Sipman (2007), Sohrabi et al. (2007), Sohrabi and Alstrup (2007), and Kukwa and Sohrabi (2008).

    In close collaboration with the author and few botanists from the Research Institute of Forest and Rangeland and Islamic Azad University of Tehran with a few European lichenologists in 2001-2004, a preliminary checklist for Iranian lichens was published by Seaward et al. (2004)  (PDF). The checklist was based on evaluation of literature and recent collections made by Iranian researchers and resulted in a list of 396 species of lichenized fungi and 8 species of lichenicolous fungi. A revised checklist by Seaward et al. (2008)  (PDF) and contains 590 species of lichenized fungi and 55 species of lichenicolous fungi.

    On 2 September 2009, MYCO-LICH: Online Mycology-Lichenology of Iran (www.myco-lich.com) was constructed by the author and all updates and detailed  information on the development of Iranian lichenology can be found on the website mainly on the following pages: