[2] With his wife, Sylvia Sharnoff, and the Canadian lichenologist Irwin M. Brodo, he was photographer for Lichens of North America, which won the 2002 National Outdoor Book Award for nature guidebooks.
[3] Smithsonian Institution's Thomas Lovejoy commented on the lichen photography that it was "the twenty-first-century equivalent of Audubon's Birds of America.
[4] In 2016, the trio, with additional collaborator Susan Laurie-Bourque, produced Keys to Lichens of North America: Revised and Expanded.
[5] A further collaboration between the two Sharnoffs and other photographers contributed pictures for Macrolichens of the Pacific Northwest.
In the late 2020s, his enthusiasm for preserving old-growth Douglas fir in the Pacific Northwest led to a new conservation group where he is the vice-president, the Friends of Douglas-Fir National Monument, aiming for the establishment of protection for an area of forest in Oregon.