Time to end the vascular plant chauvinism

Abstract

Among the vast diversity of plants, we often focus our admiration, conservation efforts and research on vascular plants: the towering trees, flowering shrubs, and beneficial grasses and herbs. However, this emphasis reveals a bias that leaves the non-vascular plants — the tiny, overlooked, inconspicuous plants — hidden in the shadows, literally. These ‘lower plants’, as the research community likes to call them, lack the majestic height, vascular structures, roots, and flowers of their larger relatives and so rarely capture our attention. However, they are key to some of the Earth’s most extreme and vulnerable habitats.

Bryophytes, non-vascular plants that include mosses, liverworts and hornworts¹, flourish in environments where even the hardiest vascular plant species cannot survive. They thrive on mountaintops, in the polar tundra, cool shrublands, and under dark forest canopies, where they have key roles in nitrogen cycling, regulating microclimates, storing carbon, pioneering new ecosystems, and serving as bio-indicators of pollution^2,3.