Resources for Pursuing Liverworts

@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. This entry will be about liverworts. There are around 250 species in our region and many of them are cosmopolitan. This is convenient because literature on liverworts is more scant than that devoted to mosses. Below are paper, online and database resources that will be helpful if you haven't stumbled across them yet. Please comment on any that I am forgetting and I will be edit them in to this document.

Books and Theses

My go to resources for liverworts are typically of the printed variety, though some are also available online. The best starting point is Wilf Schofield's Field Guide to Liverwort Genera of Pacific North America. It includes keys, descriptions, habitat and distribution notes. It is lavishly illustrated with great line (and dot) drawings of every genus in the region. Like Schofield's Common Mosses of BC book, it has a helpful section for each genus about what else it could be mistaken for and how it can be distinguished from those other taxa.

The most obscure but most regionally relevant of these is Judith Godfrey's 1977 Thesis on the Liverworts of Southwestern BC. It has a comprehensive key to genera and within those subsequent keys to species. It is available at the UBC library but thankfully more accessible online as a PDF. On this same beat @gwark mentioned a similar thesis of the same antiquity-- Bryogeography of South-Eastern Alaska by Ian Worley. It has helpful species descriptions that, given the lush liverwort (and moss) flora of the region probably covers many if not all of the species found within 50km of the coast. @gwark has repurposed the original Worley descriptions for the web and updated the taxonomy, so you can find much of that work here as well.

There are quite a few authoratative treatments of liverworts, but they are generally out of print and hard to track down. Volumes 1-3 (of 6) of Rudolf Schuster's Hepaticae and Anthocerotae of North America are now available online. You will need to log in and borrow them, but they are as comprehensive as it gets, albeit less so for the west as the volumes focus on liverworts east of the 100th meridian.

I would be remiss without mentioning my favourite liverwort book- Jean Patton's The Liverwort Flora of the British Isles, which is comprehensive, contemplative, gratuitously illustrated and broadly applicable to most of the species and genera in our region.

Online Resources

Bryophyte Flora of North America Preliminary Treatments of Liverworts (by family and genus) is getting closer and closer to completion. This reflects the more recent changes in taxonomy and species distributions.

David Wagner's Guide to the Liverworts of Oregon is an html based system for keying out liverworts. Entries are accompanied by great photographs and contemplations of the many species in our region. You will need to purchase access to this and have files sent through the mail.

Online Collection Databases

  • Bryophyte Portal - my first stop when prospecting for or reflecting on all bryophyte 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 liverworts 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 Liverworts– Focuses on the hepatics of British Columbia_. You can search for liverworts 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.
Posted on January 3, 2023 12:29 AM by rambryum rambryum

Comments

Awesome- thanks so much, @rambryum . Wonderful tips and info in these last few posts

Posted by bstarzomski about 1 year ago

Thanks @rambryum, this is great!!

Posted by abe almost 1 year ago

I'm not sure if your references are intended to cover as far north as Southeast Alaska, but I thought I would mention that Ian Worley's PhD through UBC was called the Bryo-Geography of Southeast Alaska. It was completed in the mid-70s, I think? I've seen a paper copy, but I don't know if it's available digitally. Some years ago, I got permission from him to reproduce species accounts on a website which can be seen here: https://wiki.seaknature.org/Bryophytes (I tried to update taxonomy as best I could, but it's a bit of a moving target, so no doubt there are some things that remain in need of updating.)

Posted by gwark 8 months ago

Thanks @gwark I found the online PDF of Worley's Thesis here:

https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/831/items/1.0101431

and will add both this and your species accounts repurposing to the list

Posted by rambryum 8 months ago

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