Biofouling of cultural heritage monuments.
The process of rock weathering has a global character. Unfortunately it affects also many historical monuments in the different environment. First of all it concerns rock monuments which are exposed on open air in anthropogenous environment.
The destruction of natural or artificial stone is caused by physical, chemical and biological factors. There are many groups of biological objects (fungi, bacteria, alga, lichens, glues and seed plants) which can colonize the rock surface. The biological lithobiotic communities are capable to cause color changes, transformation of chemical and mineral structure of a stone, penetrate on the significant depth in the rock substrates.
But the role and ecology of microbial communities on the rocks till now are not clear. How the members of community live in this unfavorable place? Their life we see is difficult and dramatic, but they survive at any conditions. We do no exactly how do they depend on the climate and substrate properties? We must to understand their life and struggle.
But it is the difficult task. It is explained by difficulties of study and observation on biological processes on the stone monument surface. However, if we want really to estimate and to document a condition of a monument, it is necessary to find universal methods allowing to observe, to estimate and to describe lithoboitic communities and biofouling processes. There is a question - how it to do?
The nature is wise. It has supplied biological objects such universal property as the color. All alive has the color. So we can try to use this unique property. Any stage of rock monument biofouling has the special color. It is connected with the species composition and structure of lithobiotic communities. The changes of the rock monument surface during the biological colonization can be fixed and to measure. It is not necessary to have different expensive devices and methods for this purpose. It is enough to have a digital camera. However, the fixation of the color information is most simple step. The nature carefully protects the secrets and we must to find the tools for decoding this information. We can do it using the computers programs and mathematics. The special computers programs allow quickly analyze colour changes of the stone surface images connected with the biofouling processes. The first experience in this field is the digital technology - CONSOLIDATOR_BIO.