Join us to learn about our native nonvascular seedless plants – mosses, hornworts and liverworts!

Our speaker Paul Wilson will give an introduction to mosses, liverworts and hornworts of California. These small plants are contrasted to the more familiar vascular plants (such as are treated in the Jepson Manual). Bryophytes are generally lacking in vascular tissue. This makes them short and not deeply rooted. The niche of a bryophyte is pretty much what you see. Another prominent feature of bryophytes is that they tolerate drying out, in the dry state can remain dormant for months, and upon re-wetting can quickly resume life. Although noted as being “moisture loving”, the long summer droughts of lowland California are spent in a dormant state, and bryophytes as a whole are highly diverse in the lowlands. In contrast, the high country is relatively unsuitable because the summers are still quite dry and the winters are frozen under snow. From the red-fir zone on up, dry niches are particularly poorly occupied by these little plants.

Our speaker: Paul Siri Wilson
Paul Wilson is retired from the Biology faculty at Cal State Northridge. He and his students did ecological work on bryophytes in several climatic/elevational zones in the Sierra and southern California over the last two decades. He also did research on floral evolution. He is a past president of the Bryophyte Chapter of CNPS.