Forest Resources faculty member Peter Reich was a coauthor of "The global contribution of soil mosses to ecosystem services," a new paper published in Nature Geoscience. Per the paper's abstract, the results of the team's research highlight "the contribution of mosses to soil life and functions and the need to conserve these important organisms to support healthy soils."
To learn about soil mosses' impact on ecosystems, the research team conducted "the most comprehensive global standardized field study to quantify how soil mosses influence 8 ecosystem services associated with 24 soil biodiversity and functional attributes across wide environmental gradients from all continents" and "found that soil mosses are associated with greater carbon sequestration, pool sizes for key nutrients, and organic matter decomposition rate but a lower proportion of soil-borne plant pathogens than unvegetated soils."
Read the full paper to learn more.