Jun 25, 2023 22:00:00

``Moss'', which tends to be considered dirty, turned out to be indispensable for maintaining the global environment

Mosses, the ancestors of modern plants, rarely get as much attention in environmental conservation topics as trees in the rainforest, and are often stripped and discarded for beautification and cleaning. Research that collected moss from all over the world and examined its function revealed that moss is an unsung hero that supports ecosystems and the global environment by retaining nutrients and carbon.

The global contribution of soil mosses to ecosystem services | Nature Geoscience

https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01170-x

Why mosses are vital for the health of our soil and Earth | UNSW Newsroom
https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-tech/why-mosses-are-vital-health-our-soil-and-earth

'We Were Gobsmacked': Giant Study Reveals Why Moss Is Vital For The Planet : ScienceAlert
https://www.sciencealert.com/we-were-gobsmacked-giant-study-reveals-why-moss-is-vital-for-the-planet

“When you see moss covering the soil, you might think that the land is barren or that there is something wrong with it. We are doing it,” says David Eldridge, an environmental scientist at the University of New South Wales, Australia.

The University of New South Wales and other 50 international organizations around the world, including the University of New South Wales, are working to clarify moss, which is one of the most widely distributed organisms on the planet but has never been evaluated globally for its contribution to the ecosystem. A research team of research institutions collected moss samples from more than 123 soils around the world, from rainforests to deserts to ice-bound polar regions. The total area of moss growing in the area studied is 9.4 million kilometers, which is comparable to the land area of China and Canada.

They quantified the 24 benefits that moss provides to soil and other vegetation, comparing soils with and without moss, and found that moss-rich soils were rich in nutrients. It was confirmed that the decomposition rate of organic matter is high in , and there are few pathogenic bacteria that are harmful to plants and people.

Moreover, moss contributed not only to the soil in which it grows, but to the environment of the entire planet. According to the research team, the ground where the moss grows has more carbon storage than the bare land where the topsoil is bare, and the world as a whole stores 6.43 gigatons (6.43 billion tons) of carbon. This is six times the annual carbon emissions from human land use.

Regarding the results of this calculation, Mr. Eldridge said, ``Human land use such as grazing, logging, and farming changes the carbon dioxide emissions of the land, but the moss absorbs six times as much carbon dioxide.'' I talked to

In the first place, unlike

the vascular plants to which most familiar plants belong, the roots of moss are only for anchoring to the ground called pseudoroots, and do not have the function of absorbing water. Also, the leaves are also primitive with a thickness of only one cell.

However, this does not mean that moss is a weak creature. According to Mr. Eldridge, moss that lives in dry areas in Australia becomes a round mass when the water dries up, but it does not die and continues to live semi-permanently in a state of suspended animation. Therefore, when Mr. Eldridge took out the 100-year-old moss from the bag and experimented with watering it, it seems that the moss came back to life.

Moss not only maintains the soil ecosystem, but also plays a role in saving the disturbed ecosystem due to natural disasters. For example, when

Mount St. Helens in the United States erupted in 1980 , most of the flora and fauna in the vicinity of the site died out, but it was moss that quickly returned to the mountain.

by Ed

Mr. Eldridge said about the research that investigated the environment after the volcanic eruption, 'The first thing that returned was primitive moss such as cyanobacteria and blue midori. We have shown that moss plays a role in preparing the soil for it to grow: moss is the first to come to the land, improve it, and the first to leave.”

Mr. Eldridge's future goal is to investigate whether urban moss can create as healthy soil as natural area moss. And Eldridge said he hopes to develop ways to repopulate degraded soil with moss to speed up the process of environmental regeneration.