Bryophytes and Lichens

Abstract

Bryophytes are a group of plants that appear to have evolved along a pathway separate from that of the remainder of the plant kingdom, and to have been an early evolutionary ‘branch’ from ancestral chlorophytes (green algae). These ‘primitive’ plants have no highly differentiated tissues for water conduction or mineral transport, and they absorb nutrients, water and carbon dioxide directly through their cell walls. They can survive under very varied environmental conditions, and often form a striking part of the vegetation in tundra, forests, wetlands, peatlands and the humid tropics. Some species of mosses and liverworts can recover after many years of nearly complete dehydration, a characteristic that enables them to form an important, though scientifically neglected, part of the vegetation of arid and semiarid environments.

“This is a tale of ignorance; my own and other people’s. Knowledge of desert bryophytes is so incomplete, and the publications so fragmentary that I have had to rely largely on my own observations.”

Scott (1982)

Sections 5.1 Bryophytes

Sections 5.2 Lichens