The year of moss: day 6
On days spent studying on campus, I often go for walks through Riccarton Bush, which makes for a lovely study break. Riccarton Bush is the last fragment of the forest that once cloaked the Canterbury Plains remaining within the city of Christchurch. Although relatively intact, it was grazed historically. The bush seems to have a fairly low diversity of mosses. Why this is, I am not sure, but possible hypotheses include the local climate or historic grazing. Of the mosses that are present in Riccarton Bush, Racopilum cuspidigerum seems to be the most abundant. There are two varieties of this species globally, but the only variety we have in Aotearoa is Racopilum cuspidigerum var. convolutaceum This variety is common in Aotearoa and Australia, and scattered throughout the rest of the southern hemisphere. Racopilum species have a distinctive leaf arrangement with two rows of flattened leaves and a row of smaller leaves between the flattened leaves. They also have a distinctive midvein that extends well beyond the edge of the leaf. Although the genus is distinctive, R. cuspidigerum can be challenging to distinguish from another Racopilum species, R. strumiferum. In theory, R. cuspidigerum can be distinguished by lacking a margin to the leaves (whereas R. strumiferum has a faint margin), but the difference between no margin and a faint margin is not always obvious.
Cuteness: 7/10
Distinctiveness: 7/10
LMR: 7/10
Comments
Nice. I wonder if there were a lot more mosses in Riccarton Bush before the water table dropped when the Christchurch swamps were drained for the city. I'm guessing the forest floor used to be more consistently damp through the year.
That's an interesting thought @jon_sullivan . It would be interesting to look at vegetation history of non-vascular plants, but I'd imagine it would be quite challenging to do so (my mini literature search inspired by your comment yielded a few studies that looked at spores in sediment cores, but I think overall it would be a much more challenging process than looking at vascular vegetation history, and not many people seem to have attempted).
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