2023-10-13 17:53:58
After a rainy morning, I went for a walk in the countryside. A rock covered in a thin green layer, dense and spongy, caught my attention, overflowing with life. I was surprised, since the day before, after a long period of drought, the rock showed a brown and lifeless surface. With the small magnifying glass that I always carry on my walks, I carefully examined this layer of moss. I discovered a velvety blanket made up of an intricate tangle of tiny plants. These did not have leaves, stems or roots like traditional vascular plants, but rather more elementary structures. When I touched it, I felt its spongy and wet softness.
Normally, mosses go unnoticed by me, as well as by many. However, she had recently spoken with Manuel Delgado Baquerizo, a researcher at IRNAS – CSIC. During our talk, Manuel shared his enthusiasm for mosses, a passion that he now fully understands and that I share with you in the interview we published in Talking with Scientists.
Manuel leads the MUSGONET project of the British Ecological Society. In this international project, numerous researchers from 17 countries have collected samples in 123 ecosystems, spread across the Earth. The ecosystems studied cover a wide diversity of places, from the cold Antarctic to the torrid deserts, passing through intermediate latitude environments in forests, tundra, grasslands or rocks, subject to a wide variety of climatic conditions and land uses.
Mosses, Manuel comments, are crucial in many ecosystems. They contribute to biodiversity, retain water, prevent erosion and enrich the soil. Although they are simpler than vascular plants, they can colonize even bare rocks. Despite its importance, its ecological contribution had not been evaluated on a global scale. However, MUSGONET research is changing that reality.
In a “recent article, published in the journal Nature Geoscience”: the team led by Manuel Delgado presents some of the findings that the project has provided. They estimate that mosses cover an area similar to Canada or China, being particularly dominant in the Antarctic tundra. This enormous surface covered with moss contributes to the generation of nutrient deposits, allows high rates of decomposition of organic matter and enables the capture and storage of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a capture that researchers estimate at 6,430 million tons more than the soil. naked. The amount of soil carbon associated with mosses is up to six times the annual global carbon emissions from any altered land use globally. The contribution of mosses is especially important to support multiple ecosystems where the number of vascular plants is low, contributing to soil life and functions.
I invite you to listen to Manuel Delgado Baquerizo, researcher at the Laboratory of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Functioning at the Institute of Natural Resources and Agrobiology of Seville (IRNAS – CSIC) and at the Pablo de Olavide University.
References:
Eldridge D.J. et al. Delgado-Baquerizo M. (2023) The global contribution of soil mosses to ecosystem services. Nature Geoscience. DOI:
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