Moss
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Moss, The green fuzzy stuff we love to touch in the woods and admire on rocks. But there is so much more than meets the eye when it comes to these little green mats on the forest floor. Mosses are extremely important during the early stages of ecological succession. As a new environment is being formed such as sand dunes in Presque Isle or huge boulders made of igneous granite rock in the Adirondacks that were left behind by deglaciation.
In these examples the surfaces becomes inhabited through the process of succession, during which various different plant communities dominate and take over the site such as lichens and then once they have lived and died and eat away at (lets use the granite as an example) enough for something else to take root, mosses come along and then the process continues through time and the species get bigger and more complex. “Because of their ability to reproduce A sexually by fragmentation and gemmae combined with sexual reproduction, which produces enormous numbers of tiny spores, mosses play a vital role in being among the first colonizers of disturbed sites.”
Mosses play an important part in stabilizing soil, reducing erosion, and because of their ability to retain water and being able to maintain humidity in their environments, they in turn reduce the evaporation of water, making more available for succeeding plants. They make soils fertile for maintaining life. Peat moss comes to mind. We add it to our fertilizer for added nutrition in our gardens. Peat mosses are found throughout the northeastern wetland areas, and are what makes up the majority of bogs. Peat mosses are an important source of fuel in some countries. Peat is abundant in the northern hemisphere and embodies a vast amount of potential energy. In northern Europe, peat is often dried, and compressed into briquettes for use in fireplaces and stoves. In Ireland, peat is still used often as a heating source to cook with. One great advantage of peat as a fuel is that it burns clean. About 95% of peat harvested in Ireland is burned to generate electricity. Because it has the ability to absorb large amounts of water, peat improves the water-holding capacity when added to soil. Peat mosses are acidic which prevents the growth of a lot of bacteria. So they have been used by indigenous peoples for diapers, and during the World Wars, when soldiers ran out of bandages, peat mosses were a great substitute antiseptic dressing for wounds. Sphagnum moss also has antiseptic properties. "The plant’s cell walls are composed of special sugar molecules that “create an electrochemical halo around all of the cells, and the cell walls end up being negatively charged,” “Those negative charges mean that positively charged nutrient ions [like potassium, sodium and calcium] are going to be attracted to the sphagnum.” As the moss soaks up all the negatively charged nutrients in the soil, it releases positively charged ions that make the environment around it acidic. For wounded humans, the result is that sphagnum bandages produce sterile environments by keeping the pH level around the wound low, and inhibiting the growth of bacteria."