Bryoblitz 2010

If you’re like me, mosses are probably the last thing you have thought about, unless you’re looking for a place to nap on a hike through the woods. However, as I have come to learn this year, they wondrous organisms whose diversity is greater than the places they inhabit and  deserve the same attention and respect as any other life form. 

While it is important to appreciate them and acknowledge them, one can also help protect them by saving their habitat. The only way to begin doing this is to find out where they live. This is the responsibility donned by a few of the students in Dr. Robin Kimmerer’s Ecology of Mosses class this year. Their mission is to collect samples and identify the bryophytes that inhabit Syracuse and the surrounding area.

The team consists of Andy Cortese, Jake Bakowski, Gabe Kellman, Noah Beck, Pete Delaney, and Carrie Cimo. This ambitious group will be surveying at least three different locations, Thornden Park, Wescott St., and the area around I-81 with the hope of a few more locations that are yet to be decided. Their goals are two-fold: (1) to catalogue the species diversity in order to identify similarities and differences in community composition and (2) to provide insight into their effects in urban / suburban ecology.

This project has already begun and will continue for the next few weeks. If you are interested to see what moss lives in your neck of the woods, stop by the ESF campus for their Earth Day celebration on April 23, 2010 for music, fun and an all around “moss-ome” time.

Santino Lauricella