Thursday 12 April 2018
Funaria hygrometrica in Glamorgan
Couldn't resist doing the same analysis for our Glamorgan data set, which is suitable for the last seven years only. Very interesting topic and as I suggested on your Twitter post, I wonder how much habitat survey bias might effect the frequency of recording. We probably examine a lot more brown field sites in Glamorgan than you do in Pembs, Carms & Mons (as we have a lot more of them!), a habitat in which the species seems to do well, as shown by my Felindre photo below, where Fun.hyg. was dominant in some areas. This might help explain the difference between our plots and I suspect an analysis of specific habitats might be more revealing?
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Funaria (hygrometrica) was the type moss for Biology A-level and undergraduate Botany courses - look in any British Botany textbook. It was chosen for the curriculum because it was (supposedly) easy for teachers to find in the vicinities of schools and universities. Personally, I was never able to find it consistently for my Level 1 undergarduate classes. It was much easier to find Bryum capillare, which in my opinion would have been a better candidate. Yet, all the prepared slides of 'moss capsule' which we bought in for our pracs were prepared from Funaria.
ReplyDeleteIt is fairly frequent on forest roads in NPT, but most of our records are from 'ruderal' sites, where it is unpredictable. I did a quick calculation: out of 50 records we've made in the last 6 years, 29 are from forestry sites and the rest are from open mosaic habitats/ruderal sites.
Sorry, that should read: '...out of 60 records we've made in the last 6 years, 29 are from forestry sites........'.
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