Lecidella mandshurica was formally described as a new species in 2015 by lichenologists Sergey Kondratyuk, Laszlo Lőkös, and Jae-Seoun Hur.

The species epithet mandshurica refers to Manchuria, a historical and geographic region in Northeast Asia where the authors suggest that the lichen is common.

The lichen has been documented from several locations in the southernmost parts of Primorsky Krai in the Russian Far East, including the Khasan and Nadezhdino districts, as well as from Sakhalin and Khabarovsk regions.

[1] This is what happened when molecular phylogenetic analysis was used to show that specimens collected from China as Lecidella aff.

elaeochroma, deposited as DNA sequences on GenBank, were genetically identical with Lecidella mandshurica, thus expanding the distribution to include China.