History, biogeography, and species of Montana mosses (1880-2018)

Elliott, Joe; Pipp, Andrea

Montana has one of the richest recorded moss floras of the western United States (Eckel et al. 1997), even though large areas of the state remain under surveyed. The Flora of North America (FNA) volumes 27 (2007) and 28 (2014) include 1,402 species found in the continental United States (U.S.), Canada, Greenland, and St. Pierre and Miquelon, of which 508 species have been recorded in Montana. Including varieties and subspecies, Montana has 522 moss taxa. The rich moss flora is due to the habitat and climatic diversity across the state and a long history of bryological exploration that began in the late 1800s. This article describes a history of the explorers, their surveys, notes on moss biogeographical distributions, and a checklist of documented moss taxa in Montana. This checklist is a revision to the second preliminary checklist (Elliott 1993), which listed 408 taxa. The substantial increase in the number of moss taxa since 1993 indicates that, as in much of the western United States, our knowledge of the Montana moss flora continues to expand with increased field and herbarium studies. The discovery of mosses in eastern North America appears to be reaching saturation, but this is not true for western North America, where the accumulation of new species has continued to rise steeply over the last three decades (Carter et al. 2016).