What is a Bryophyte?
Bryophytes are the first land plants that include three distinct lineages: mosses, liverworts, and hornworts. They differ primarily from the flowering plants by lacking roots, flowers, seeds, and a defined system of tissues for transporting fluids throughout the plant. Bryophytes reproduce not by seeds but by single-celled spores. Many bryophytes can also form new plants by vegetative means. Bryophytes are important in ecosystem function. They assist in protecting soil from erosion and release the water stored in their cells gradually back into the environment. Bryophytes have two features that make them fairly unique; they are capable of dealing with long periods of desiccation thereby shutting down all cellular activity and then the ability to rapidly come back to life when water again becomes available. What happened in 2003? 2003 was another productive year that yielded new bryophyte records for the state. As in 2002, the contributions of NNPS members providing Lloyd Stark and I wi
“Bryophyte” is an informal grouping of all non-vascular land plants (embryophytes). Non-vascular means the plant lacks vascular tissue, that is, channels for distributing fluids and nutrients to its tissues. Because of a lack of vascular tissue, bryophytes are relatively short, no more than about 10 cm (4 in) tall. Bryophytes include hornworts (Anthocerotophyta), liverworts (Marchantiophyta), and mosses (Bryophyta). Historically, all these groups were considered part of Bryophyta, until closer analysis determined that hornworts and liverworts were different enough from mosses and each other to place in their own divisions. Bryophytes evolved from the green algae, and reproduce through spores, requiring substantial moisture for their dispersal. Bryophytes were the first land plants, with a fossil record stretching back to the early Ordovician, about 475 million years ago. The evidence comes in the form of fossilized spore sacs extracted from boreholes in Oman. As bryophytes are fragile
If you read no more than this page, you will have a very basic, but good, understanding of the nature and ecology of bryophytes. Much of the rest of the website consists of expansions of the topics presented here and you can get to many of those expansions by clicking on the embedded links. The word bryophyte is the collective term for mosses, hornworts and liverworts and bryology is the study of bryophytes. While there are marked differences between these three groups of organisms, they are related closely enough to warrant a single term that includes all three. So a moss is a bryophyte, a liverwort is a bryophyte and a hornwort is a bryophyte. These are all plants, scientifically classified within the Plant Kingdom. They are spore-producing, rather than seed-producing, plants and they are all without flowers. Like any living organisms bryophytes are classified hierarchically. Related species are grouped into genera, related genera are grouped into families and so on. That topic is th
