I’ve been looking into our options for helping with moss conservation and, honestly, the list is about as long as moss is tall, which suggests that moss conservation really isn’t on many people’s radars at this point. Here’s what I did find- the Irish Peatland Conservation Council recommends gardening without using peat moss the Lancashire […]
Archive for the ‘Plant Communities’ Category
Growing a moss conservation conversation
If you give a moss a forestry rotation
As I mentioned in my previous post, mosses are very sensitive to changes in microclimate. Forestry practices can, therefore, have a big impact on moss diversity and persistence in any one location. Over the last few years we’ve gotten a better sense of the scale at which those management decisions affect local mosses. Researchers in […]
Are we at critical moss?
I’ve spent the last two weeks looking into moss conservation around the world– how are mosses faring? have we taken conservation action? do we need to? And I feel like the most common response I found in literature dated as recently as nine years ago was ‘We don’t have enough information to judge.’ This is […]
An emerald carpet
I recently read a book telling the fictional story of a woman from the 1800s who studied mosses, and it occurred to me that I have really no clue about moss conservation or even moss ecology. I know that mosses tend to grow in moist locations, they don’t get very tall, and, like all plants, […]
Keeping the boreal forest in tune
As you’ve seen in my previous posts, there are some big issues facing boreal forests and the birds that live there both as summer migrants and year-round. These issues include habitat loss and fragmentation, as well as the impacts of climate change. Some researchers have suggested that we need to protect large areas of important […]
A swiftly changing forest
In my last post, I talked about the impacts of forest loss and fragmentation on boreal birds. These issues impact birds whether they are year-round residents or summer visitors, and the impacts can be pretty intense- Sauer et al. (2005) estimated that the boreal chickadee population experienced an annual decline of about 3.6% between 1966 […]
If a tree falls in the boreal forest, do the birds pay attention?
When we think of boreal forests, we may think of dense networks of coniferous trees covering the landscape, but the reality is a bit more complicated than that- in addition to deciduous trees in the understory and canopy and bodies of water of all shapes and sizes, boreal forests are mosaics with patches of different […]
Careful management for moths
In my last post I mentioned that two of the biggest challenges facing native moth populations are unintended targeting by biological control species and habitat fragmentation. With regard to biological control, the remedy is to be as selective with insect-specific controls as we are with other species, and that’s something to be addressed at a […]
Combating the swamp of sadness
Getting the water just right
As I have mentioned in previous posts, wetlands around the world are disappearing, in part because of land use changes and climate change. We should all be concerned about these losses because wetlands provide a number of ecosystem services that benefit us all, services like water filtration, vital wildlife habitat, carbon sequestration (in the peat), […]