Towards bryophyte landscape ecology in boreal eastern Canada: bryophyte population and community dynamics at the landscape scale

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Bryophytes are small colonial plants (generally less than 10cm tall) that are abundant and very diverse in boreal forests. They live in different habitats in the forest, such as dead wood, tree trunks and exposed mineral soil, and many species can only live in these patchy habitats. Instead of seeds they reproduce with spores and vegetative structures and while these structures are very small it is not really known how far they can travel from the mother plant to colonise new habitats. We also don’t understand how the forest types surrounding the bryophytes influence their ability to make spores. This means that we don’t know how changing the boreal landscape by forest management or other development types will influence the abundance of species of bryophytes. With this research program I propose to determine the maximum distance between habitats that permits new individuals to establish new colonies, and how the types of forests and disturbances in a given area affect bryophyte species presence and their abilities to travel across the landscape. This is important to determine, as in European countries where the forest landscape has been greatly changed by forest management and development, many bryophyte species are now rare but are still fairly common in Canada. With the results of this research program we could develop guidelines to make sure that we don’t change the boreal landscape too much, and reduce bryophyte species’ ability to continue travelling across the landscape.