Assistant Professor University of Minnesota Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States
Mosses and other bryophytes are “natural sponges”, but their effects on forest hydrology are uncertain. How much moss is there actually in a forest? And how much water could it be holding? I will present results from epiphyte surveys across climates and forest types in Minnesota, USA. Tree-level measurements are upscaled to forest-level estimates of impacts on hydrology, which reveal high variability but also high importance in some forests where epiphytic bryophytes retain significant proportions of typical rain events. Given their different climate sensitivities from host trees, we need to account for bryophytes in forecasting hydrological effects of climate change.
