The DUKE bryophyte collection has been and is being actively utilized by members of the bryological community for the Bryophyte Flora of North America Project (BFNA).
We project likely broad scale changes to species richness and abundance within production stands for five taxonomic groups including ground vegetation, tree-living bryophytes, lichens, saproxylic beetles, and birds.
The cover of log surfaces measured consisted of direct soil contact, mostly underneath, and cover by lateral overgrowing by dense mats of ground vegetation (i.e. bryophytes and vascular plants normally growing in undisturbed ground vegetation).
The biological processes in a stream are driven by two factors: the sun, which provides energy for algae and bryophytes such as mosses, and the vegetation debris the leaves, branches, and logs that fall into the stream which provides energy for the microorganisms that remove the nitrogen and phosphorus from the stream water.
We then scored the presence of live and moribund moss within vegetation samples and identified live bryophytes to species level24.
We used the point-intercept method (Brancaleoni et al. 2003) completing 50 intercept points per transect (every 20 cm) to record vascular plant species richness (calculated at the transect level) and ground cover by species and types (bare soil, debris and vegetation, which was differentiated in lichens, bryophytes, dicots, monocots and ferns).
The vegetation on the meadow West was dominated by Festuca rubra, Phleum pratense, Poa trivialis, and Bryophytes.
The cross-taxon congruence of species diversity (species richness and species composition) among vascular plants, bryophytes, lichens, fungi, oligochaetes, butterflies and birds was investigated with special attention to testing the potential role of vegetation as surrogate for the other studied taxa.
Short-term effects of the restoration on peatland hydrology, chemistry and vegetation are promising but little is known about how other species groups apart from vascular plants and bryophytes respond to restoration efforts.
