Why study bryophytes?
Mosses and liverworts make rewarding subjects for study by amateur naturalists because:- 1) The geographical distributions of bryophytes are poorly known compared with those of larger, more conspicuous plants and animals. Recording the hectad (10 km squares) – distributions of vertebrates and vascular plants in Britain nowadays consists of repeating earlier studies in order to elucidate changes in distributions during the intervening years. But the distributions of cryptogams and inconspicuous invertebrates are much more sketchily known, even in England, where natural history is traditionally popular. Away from the south-east, naturalists may easily find bryophytes not previously recorded for a county, or not recorded there for many years, and establish that some species are much commoner than hitherto realized. 2) It is also more rewarding to elucidate the geographical distributions of bryophytes than vascular plants because bryophytes are neither deliberately controlled nor planted b
