Bryolog 14 (27 November 2018)
Upcoming
As a general policy, check the website for event updates before you walk out the door!
- SOBEFREE 24 will be held Friday to Monday, 29 March to 1 April 2019 at Rancho El Chorro in San Luis Obispo. Deadline for registration is 1 January 2019: $25 late fee will be applied thereafter. More information and registration forms available HERE…
- On Saturday 1 December 2018, the CNPS Sanhedrin Chapter will be exploring mosses up in the beautiful Baechtel Creek Canyon in the Willits area. Meet at Rite Aid in Ukiah by 9:00 am or the Rite Aid in Willits by 9:30 am to carpool. Expect winter conditions with little sun in the canyon. Heavy rain will cancel event, light showers okay. Bring snacks. Ending by 1:00 pm. Leaders: Marisela de Santa Ana (707-459-2681) and Kerry Heise (707-489-1500).
- Paul Wilson will lead a microscope day Saturday, 5 January from 10 am to 4 pm at the Cheadle Center for Biodiversity and Restoration, on the campus of University of California, Santa Barbara, Harder South (Building 578) next to Harder Stadium. Pay for parking in lot 38. Bring your bryophytes and we will key them out together. For more information, email amandaheinrich777@gmail.com
- In cooperation with the Santa Monica Mountains L.A. Chapter, Paul Wilson will lead a day of mosses+ on Saturday 9 February. Meet at Caballero Canyon Trail (near Reseda Blvd and Country Club Pl) 8:00–12:00, bring a hand lens. Meet at Cal State Northridge, Chaparral Hall (first 4-story building along Lindley as you walk north into campus from parking along Lindley between Parthenia and Nordhoff), third floor, CR 5335, 1:00–4:00, bring lunch. Participants are welcome to attend one or both events.
- Ben Carter will teach an Introduction to Bryophytes workshop 9:00 am to 4:30 pm, 23 and 24 February 2019 at the Chico State Herbarium, with the field portion of the course at nearby Bidwell Park. For more information about workshop content, please contact benjamin.carter@sjsu.edu. For information about registration please contact sscholten@csuchico.edu.
- Brent Mishler and Ken Kellman will teach their legendary weekend workshop “Introduction to Bryophytes” on 2-3 March 2019, in the Jepson Herbarium Public Programs series. Details and registration information are available at http://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/workshops/.
Quarterly Report
- Carl Wishner and Kerry Heise report on their bryophyte workshop in Nevada City—MORE…
- Larke Reeber has been elected the next Secretary of the Chapter, and Bill Thiessen has been elected the next Director of Field Trips. Their terms will start during SO BE FREE and run for two years.
- December is the last month that Paul Wilson will match your donation to the mini-grant fund for bryological research. Read Paul’s challenge and how to donate HERE…
- To students who wish to apply for a mini-grant, here is the RFP…
Timeless Bits
- Jim Shevock on the importance of recently collected bryophyte specimens—EDITORIAL…
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California Naturalists Explore Bryophytes in the Northern Sierra Nevada
— Carl Wishner and Kerry Heise
On October 28, Carl Wishner, Bryophyte Chapter Liaison to the Redbud Chapter (Nevada and Placer Counties) and Kerry Heise, Liaison to the Sanhedrin Chapter (inland Mendocino and Lake Counties) presented a workshop at Miners Foundry in Nevada City for the UC California Naturalists and Sierra Streams Institute partners, Sierra Bioregional Rendezvous. There were over 100 attendees to the day-long affair with several plenary talks and workshops including Dr. Sarah Yarnell’s work on Foothill yellow-legged frog ecology and conservation and Sierran meadow restoration. Twenty-four persons attended the bryophyte program, which included a brief discussion of basic biology and ecology of mosses and liverworts, followed by a short field excursion to the beautiful nearby Tribute Trail of the Bear-Yuba Land Trust in Deer Creek. Kerry and Carl had previously scouted the route to assess the range of bryophytes there available to share with the participants. The habitat is mixed hardwood-conifer forest at 2,400 ft. elevation, with both north and south-facing slopes and a perennial stream with large boulders and pools at the bottom. The forest canopy is moderately dense with Douglas-fir, incense cedar, ponderosa pine, black oak, canyon live oak, and an understory with mountain dogwood, toyon, honeysuckle, etc. Large granite boulders provided additional substrates for bryophytes.
As is often the case with an introduction to bryophytes, there was much to observe and learn, and not enough time to take it in. At least thirty-five species were easily found, with pleurocarpous mosses being the most abundant and diverse. With so many species available, the group focused on ten or so of the most common and interesting ones, and the participants were afforded the opportunity to collect their “assigned species” which they did not know beforehand into standard bryophyte packets. These were brought back for a short laboratory exercise wherein six binocular dissecting scopes, and six compound scopes were set up for close examination of the specimens. In addition, a number of the other species collected earlier by Carl and Kerry were set out with labels, and description of the group, whether moss, pleurocarpous versus acrocarpous, and liverworts, both complex thalloid forms and leafy forms. The students closely examined Antitrichia californica, Dendroalsia abietina, Dicranoweisia cirrata, Homalothecium nuttallii, Hypnum subimponens, Isothecium cristatum, I. stoloniferum, Orthodicranum tauricum, Orthotrichum lyellii, Plagiomnium medium; Asterella bolanderi, Cephaloziella divaricata var. divaricata, C. turneri, and Porella cordeana. Many others were available including several undetermined Grimmia spp. and Orthotrichum from rocks, as well as Amphidium californicum, Bryum canariense, Polytrichum piliferum, Racomitrium affine, and Syntrichia ruralis. No hornworts were evident, however.
Overall, the participants expressed great appreciation to the workshop leaders and their knowledge and enthusiasm about bryophytes, and that they wished there had been enough time to learn more.
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Editorial: The role and increasing importance of recently collected bryophyte specimens
—Jim Shevock, California Academy of Sciences
One might suppose that the California bryoflora is fairly well documented, at least for certain geographical areas of the state where local bryofloras have been produced. However, new species for California and for science continue to be discovered. One activity that has been productive is the study of molecular systematics underway around the world and containing species that also reside in California. Huge gaps remain in Genbank for many genera or for species-rich groups where only a handful of species have been sequenced to date, often for few gene regions.
One of the ongoing discoveries based on molecular studies is the recognition of new taxa from species that we thought we understood well. Either their distribution or taxonomy has had to be updated. Here in California, a new species was described in 2018 from a species that was previously viewed as widespread. We’ve been calling plants Plagiothecium denticulatum or P. laetum for decades that DNA evidence suggested is different. It is now named as Plagiothecium pacificum (Wynns et al. 2018), seemingly endemic to our coastal plain. Another Californian plant that has been ‘problematic’ in the genus Philonotis was recently determined to represent a species heretofore known only from South America: Philonotis minuta now appears to have an interesting North/South American distribution pattern (Jimenez & Toren 2018). Another trend is that new genera are being carved out of larger ones (or resurrected), and many smaller families are being recognized. Two new genera were christened this year and these too are species that occur in California. Not only were these two species part of Hypnum, a genus of at least 80 species (Crosby et al. 2000), but both species were determined not to even belong in the Hypnaceae, and therefore, are now transferred into the Pylaisiaceae. Hypnum revolutum is now Roaldia revoluta. And Hypnum vaucheri is now Buckia vaucheri (Câmara et al. 2018). This is one of the ongoing trends: re-organizing the circumscription of genera and moving taxa from one family to another. It is a fascinating time as we get a better picture of the evolutionary history and relationships among bryophytes. But what is really needed to speed up these molecular investigations is recently collected specimens with ample material that is well-labelled, especially for less common species so they can become available in herbaria for DNA investigation.
Many genera in California are ripe for such a molecular study, but for some species groups there just is not enough recently collected herbarium material available to sequence. Either the specimens that exist are too old, of poor quality or quantity, or they were dried or treated in a manner where the DNA has been highly degraded.
In California, we have numerous bryophytes with European names attached to them. Many of these species are indeed distributed across the Northern Hemisphere, but how many of them deserve to be recognized as North American or even Californian endemics? It was not that long ago that a molecular study of the genus Scleropodium (Carter 2012) confirmed a cryptic species hiding among Scleropodium obtusifolium specimens: it became Scleropodium occidentale. A similar situation manifested itself within Scouleria where the genus as now viewed went from 3 to 6 species by resurrecting 2 species from Russia and describing a new species from the Pacific slope of Oregon and California. I view the genus Isothecium as another challenge to unravel along the Pacific slope, to make sense out of a wide array of ecological forms we observe in the field.
Probably every person who has done extensive field work in California knows of plants that would benefit from some type of molecular insight. In my view, it is those who know the plants in the field who are best equipped to identity projects that could be accomplished by graduate students. There is definitely no shortage of species to investigate from California. I have been a relatively active bryophyte collector and it’s good to see many of my collections (especially from more exotic locales) now being used by colleagues around the world to answer so many different research questions. But nothing can proceed without access to specimens that are properly prepared and well identified. The need for herbaria and continued accessions have never been greater, yet staff and resources provided for herbarium management continue to decline. Taxonomic mysteries could be unraveled by specimen-based research that offers so many opportunities for budding bryologists. At least for the foreseeable future, it will be members of such organizations like the Bryophyte Chapter of CNPS to keep an ongoing interest in collections, refining the distribution of species across the landscape with the production of localized bryofloras and vouchered checklists, and aid other researchers with field knowledge and access to specimens for molecular study. Those with field experience that observe how species partition the landscape are also the same persons most likely to see things that look “out of place” or recognize when species display a growth form not seen or documented previously. These are the types of specimens we need to get into herbaria and channel into various molecular projects. In addition, we all have experience with specimens that do not readily key out. I wonder how many of these are taxa waiting for a different circumscription.
References
Câmara, P.E.A.S., Carvalho-Silva, M., Henriques, D.K., Guerra, J., Gallego, M.T., Poveda, D.R. & Stech, M. 2018. Pylaisiaceae Schimp. (Bryophyta) revisited. Journal of Bryology 40: 251–264.
Carter, B. 2012. Scleropodium occidentale (Brachytheciaceae), a new moss species from western North America. The Bryologist 115: 222–230.
Crosby, M. R., Magill, R.E., Allen, B. & He, S. 2000. A checklist of the mosses. Version released July 26, 2000. Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis. 320 pp.
Jimenez, S. & Toren, D.R. 2018. Philonotis minuta (Bartramiaceae, Bryophyta) is proposed as the correct name for P. brevifolia, and recorded for the first time in North America from California (U.S.A.). Cryptogamie, Bryologie 39:389–396.
Wynns, J.T., Munk, K.R. & Asmussen Lang, C.B. 2018. Molecular phylogeny of Plagiothecium and similar hypnalean mosses, with a revised sectional classification of Plagiothecium. Cladistics 34: 469–501.
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