Identifying mosses and liverworts

Mosses can seem daunting to identify - and some mosses are definitely harder than others. However, some can be quite distinctive, and there are common species which can provide success and encouragement. (Some mosses have stupidly small leaves and should be put somewhere safe for when you're feeling more bryologically confident).

The FSC (in fact, specifically Martin Godfrey, my erstwhile Moss Tutor) has produced a little fold-out photo guide to mosses and liverworts of towns and gardens. It's only £3.30 so won't break the bank. The photos are really good as they capture the different forms of these common species rather well. It would be an excellent start to get your eye in (although I am obliged to say that you should still examine your finds under a microscope for certainty and the sheer pleasure of it).

You should also check out the British Bryological Society's website, where you can download for free the field key from their recent (lavishly illustrated) fieldguide. There are also links to all the species descriptions and photos from the book. I have a hard copy you can look at - as a budding bryologist you might eventually like to order one from here. I've had some success using this in the field and I do recommend it, although the number of species is rather off-putting to the beginner, and the binding is so flimsy that mine's fallen apart already. And I'm sure there are some issues with some parts of the key. But it's certainly worth trying as the key is supposed to work with just a hand lens.

So, the above field guide is very nice and glossy, but sometimes its lack of detailed illustrations leaves you wondering whether you could really ever know whether your identification is right - at which point Dave M and I always like to turn to one of the Moss Classics, E V Watson's 'British Mosses and Liverworts'. We have a couple of copies of this and there are a couple in the library. It was first written in 1955 and revised twice - but it's still really useful (though you may need to look up the most recent species names). It has lots of clear drawings of what you'd see under a light microscope (the cell structure of moss leaves is very diagnostic, and may I say lovely). If you want, you can get a second-hand copy reasonably cheaply. You are very welcome to come to the field centre and use our copies along with the microscopes.

The hard core might also turn to A J E Smith's ' The Moss Flora of Britain and Ireland' - we have a copy of this too, but it makes my head hurt.

PD image by Terrific

There are some habitat-specific resources you could try - there's a booklet you can print showing 'Mosses and Liverworts of Town and Garden' on the BBS website, and we have a book called 'Mosses and Liverworts of Woodland' (by Alan Perry). These describe whole plants, which can be a useful way in, but for this assignment you need to prove you're doing more than just matching pictures with your specimen. So you're going to have to face one of the keys above at some point.

At first it can be tricky to even work out which features you're supposed to be looking at (and there's a certain amount of terminology - though the BBS guide does try to limit this) - so do seek our help if you'd like.

Here's some information on collecting and labelling them.