Living systems often require chemical elements and chemical compounds, including complex sugars, proteins, and odor-making compounds, to perform critical activities. These compounds exist in various states–solid, liquid, and gas–and are ubiquitous in soil, water, and air. This requires that living systems not only have ways to capture, absorb, or filter them, but also ways to differentiate among them, selecting those that are valuable or harmful. For example, mangrove trees live with their roots in salty water and sediments. Various mangrove species have different strategies for removing salt from the water they take in so that their tissues can use the fresh water.
Division Bryophyta (“moss plant”): Mosses, liverworts, hornworts
Bryophytes are one of the oldest groups of plants, appearing more than 500 million years ago in the Cambrian Period. Mosses are non-vascular, non-flowering, water-loving plants, often cushioning the floor of forests in dense mats. Unlike angiosperms or gymnosperms, mosses do not have fruits or seeds––they reproduce through spores. Currently, there are approximately 12,000 known species of mosses and their relatives. Sphagnum moss has been particularly useful to humans, as a key element in peat, and as a dressing for wounds in traditional cultures and along the battlelines of World War I.
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