Resources for Pursuing Mosses in the Pacific Northwest

@bstarzomski suggested I put together a list of resources that could be useful for others trying to understand bryophytes and lichens in the Pacific Northwest. I’ll try and do it in parts– this one for mosses, later ones for liverworts, hornworts and lichens. Below are online and offline resources I frequently use when trying to find, ID, interpret and relate to mosses. There are upwards of about 1000 species of mosses in the broad region– these resources should help you figure most of them out. I will doubtlessly forget things, so if you have things to add to the guide, pop them in the comments and I will edit them in.

Books and Guides (offline)

• Schofield, W.B. 1992.  Some Common Mosses of British Columbia.  Royal British Columbia Museum. An excellent field guide with keys covering the most common species and genera of mosses in our region focusing on field characters that can be discerned with the eye or a hand lens.
• Vitt, D. H., J.E. Marsh, and R. Bovey. 1988. Mosses, lichens and ferns of northwest North America. Lone Pine Publications, Edmonton, Alta. The only full-colour guide to bryophytes in our region. 
• Pojar, J., and A. MacKinnon. 2016. Plants of the Pacific Northwest Coast. Lone Pine Publications, Edmonton, Alta. What more needs to be said about this book? Covers about 50 bryophytes and a good introduction.

Floras, Guides and Keys (online)

• Elva Lawton’s Moss Flora of the Pacific Northwest (free PDF from Hattori Botanical Laboratory). This is the go to technical resource for identifying mosses in the PNW. You will likely need a microscope to use it to its full potential. Comprehensive, though there have been many taxonomic changes and many new species recorded since its publication in the early 1970s.
• Flora of North America Mosses- Family List for Volume 27 and Volume 28. Comprehensive but harder to sift through as there are many species, genera and families that are not around our region. There is a key to genera (444 couplets!) hosted elsewhere.
• A perspective oriented guide to the bryophyte genera of North America. This is not a traditional dichotomous key and is generally more accessible and intuitive. You will still need to have some comfort with bryophyte language before using it, though it does include a glossary if that helps.
• California Moss eFlora- Excellent resource with keys to every genera in California. Broad overlap, so can be useful to check in on with species descriptions, habitat notes and illustrations.
• Rare Bryophytes of Oregon- a great book highlighting some of the rarer bryos in the region.
• Rare Mosses of Washington- a list of rare mosses in Washington.
• Mosses and Liverworts of the National Forests in Alaska- a quick guide showcasing some of the more common species at the northern end of our region.

Online Collection Databases

• Bryophyte Portal - my first stop when prospecting for or reflecting on moss expeditions. You can search by geographic region, genus, collector, year and more. It has a handy feature where if you select a geographic region and leave the taxon search field empty, you can print out a species list that I use as a primer on what to be on the lookout for. Indexes almost all herbarium collections of bryophytes relevant to the PNW, including collections currently housed on other continents and other coasts.
• Consortium on PNW Herbaria- As above but you can search other groups of “plants”.
• Eflora BC Mosses– Includes many species write ups from Schofield’s _Some Common Mosses of British Columbia_. You can search for mosses by species or genus, all accompanied by distribution maps and many of them are accompanied by a photo gallery
• iNaturalist Bryophytes of the Pacific Northwest project erected by @johndreynolds to catalogue bryophytes in the area. Includes 140,000+ records of roughly 750 species. Can search by Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species, user, location, date et al. Chances are if you are seeing something prominent in May in Olympia or Nanaimo, others are also seeing it all around you.

Genus Specific Resources

By my watch, the three most speciose moss groups in the PNW are Sphagnum, Racomitrium and Bryum. All of them can be very challenging, but there is no other way to learn them than to try and figure them out. Lawton does not treat Sphagnum, and her treatments of Racomitrium and Bryum, while great jumping off points, have not kept up with changes within those groups. I have found the following resources particularly helpful:

• Racomitrium: @david1945wagner ‘s Oregon-focused, but broadly applicable treatment of the genus includes a key, visual demonstration of key characters and write ups for 20 species within the genus.
• Bryum/Bryaceae: The Flora of North America Treatment of the family Bryaceae (most of which were traditionally treated as part of the genus Bryum) is very extensive but I found it took some baby steps for me. Luckily, the author of that key (John Spence) also has published a companion set of notes on how to approach the family in North America with an emphasis on asexual reproduction, sexual states, leaf arrangement and leaf morphology
• Sphagnum: to my mind the most nebulous of genera, with about 30 species in the region. While there are no region-specific guides, many of the species are cosmopolitan, so you can use some of these resources together with the Flora of North America treatment of the genus to get to species (or at least subgenus).

• Books: I use Sphagnum Mosses: Stars of the European Mires an incredible visual guide with broad overlap of species in our region. Sphagnum Mosses of Eastern Canada is similar and has an extensive visual key to subgenera and species, but the production quality is not as high. Still a great resource.
• Dr. Dale Vitt has spent decades looking at Sphagnum in Western North America. He put together two great guides– This one specific to Alberta peatlands (again with broad overlap) and this review and key to all bryophytes common in N. Am. peatlands, with a heavy emphasis on Sphagnum.
• iNaturalist user @janetwright has put together Sphagnum with Slides a compendium of species observations with microscopic photos to show the key anatomical and morphological features that are not necessarily visible in the field.
• The Geological Survey of Canada published the Macroscopic Identification Key to 36 Species of Sphagnum in Eastern Canada, which is a great field guide for characters visible with the naked eye (or at most a hand lens). The majority of the species in this guide occur in our region as well.

Microscope equipment and tips

I wrote another post detailing resources for microscopy. I would like to follow it up with some basics for how to use the microscope to look at cross sections, see cell walls, papillae and cell types. For now, the resources listed in this post will get you mostly there.

Posted on January 2, 2023 10:52 PM by rambryum