BRYOLOGICAL STUDIES IN THE WESTERN CARPATHIANS

PREFACE

The Carpathians are a large arched mountain chain in Central Europe, about 1300 km long, extending from the gorge of the Danube near Bratislava, Slovakia, to the Iron Gate near Orșova, Romania. They cover an area of about 209,000 sq. km, taking in seven countries (Austria, the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, the Ukraine and Romania). These mountains are divided into three major units, the Western, Eastern and Southern Carpathians (Transylvanian Alps). The first of these is situated mainly in Poland and Slovakia, with some minor parts in the Czech Republic, Austria and Hungary. Additionally, a small piece of the Eastern Carpathians, namely the Western Bieszczady Range, is within present day Poland, but these mountains lie principally in the Ukraine and Romania.

Bryological research in the Polish Western Carpathians has a long and interesting history. A generally accepted starting date is 1813 when the Swedish botanist Göran Wahlenberg made his famous expedition to the highest part of the Carpathians in present day Slovakia and Poland. Wahlenberg published the results of his investigations in record time a year later in his opus Flora Carpatorum Principalium, which for several decades was the only source of information on the mosses of the Tatras. Although he worked mostly in the southern part of the Tatras, and from this area he cited definite stations for rare and infrequent species, he also visited some localities in the northern part of these mountains now lying in Poland. He remarked that many common species were “ubique frequentissime” or “ubique copiose” in the study area.

The first specific stations for mosses in the Polish Tatras were published only in 1849 by Jan Kanty Hiacynt Łobarzewski, who in his neglected work Musci hypnoidei Haliciae rariores reported Ptychodium plicatum, Palustriella commutata var. falcata and Hygrohypnum luridum from Dolina Kościeliska in the Western Tatras.

In the second half of the nineteenth century the moss flora of the Polish Western Carpathians attracted the attention of several botanists and the first strictly bryological work from this area was published in 1865 by A. Rehmann.

Later some important contributions were published by J. Krupa and J. Czerkawski as well as German bryologists, including K. G. Limpricht, who visited the Tatras and the Babia Góra massif in the early 1870s. A culmination of the bryological investigations in the Polish Western Carpathians in that century was the excellent monograph Enumeratio muscorum frondosorum Tatrensium (1886) by T. Chałubiński.

If in the first half of the twentieth century bryological studies stagnated, the second half brought a remarkable intensification of fieldwork which resulted in a rapid increase in bryological information, especially from the Western Beskidy, medium-high mountains situated between the Carpathian foothills in the north and the Tatras in the south. Despite this, some areas remain poorly investigated bryologically.

In recent decades a wealth of data has been accumulated both in herbaria and field notebooks. Thanks to financial support from the State Committee for Scientific Research, an excellent opportunity has arisen to publish part of this data in a single volume. Nature in the Polish Carpathians, especially the Western Beskidy, is increasingly endangered by large industrial centres, excessive forest management and excessive tourism, all of which cause major changes to the bryoflora.

The principal purpose of the present book is to document the state of preservation of moss flora in selected regions of the Western Carpathians at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The book comprises 15 articles which may be divided into three groups. Although a catalogue of the mosses of the Polish Carpathians is still in preparation, the state of knowledge of the regional moss flora allows the presentation of the first Red-list of threatened moss species in this region.

The next seven articles deal with individual species or genera which are rare or of phytogeographical interest. Two of them consider distributions of the protected Buxbaumia viridis. Two others deal with rare species of Splachnum and Tetraplodon angustatus. Another article discusses oceanic Hookeria lucens.

The final group consists of contributions dealing with undercollected areas of the Polish Western Carpathians with new floristic records.

We thank all contributors for their cooperation and especially acknowledge Mr Arthur Copping for linguistic support. We also thank Dr Piotr Szmajda, owner of Sorus Publisher, for advice and help in editing this book.

Cisownica, September 2004
Adam Stebel
Ryszard Ochyra

THREATENED MOSS SPECIES IN THE POLISH CARPATHIANS IN THE LIGHT OF A NEW RED-LIST OF MOSSES IN POLAND

JAN ŻARNOWIEC, ADAM STEBEL AND RYSZARD OCHYRA

Abstract. The first Red-list of the Carpathian moss species and a new list of mosses threatened in Poland are provided. The Carpathian Red-list contains 135 species (ca 23% of the total Polish Carpathian moss flora) and the new Polish Red-list comprises 231 species (33% of the total moss flora of Poland). Causes of threat, key habitats for the maintenance of moss species diversity and problems of the protection of mosses in Poland are discussed.

Key words: Red-list, threatened species, mosses, Carpathians, Poland

NTRODUCTION

Man’s activities dramatically change the natural environment, bringing about degradation and finally destruction. In these circumstances a large number of moss species, which are highly specialized plants often showing a narrow ecological tolerance, display a marked reduction of their original ranges and many of them disappear (Stewart 1995).
The phenomenon of moss extinction has been noted since the early days of modern bryology and one of the first instances regarding this problem dates from 1811 when Crome (1811) failed to rediscover Gymnostomum pulvinatum Hedw. (=Grimmia anodon Bruch & Schimp.) at its locus classicus near Göttingen in Germany. A few decades later, Bruch et al. (1844) described the destruction of Tayloria rudolphiana Bruch & Schimp.

at one of its classic stations in the Alps. In modern times Pseudocalliergon turgescens (T. Jensen) Loeske, a species occurring in abundance in the 1950s in the Biała Przemsza river basin in Upper Silesia in central southern Poland at its only localities in the Central European Lowlands (Kuc 1955, 1956, 1959), joined the ranks of the aforementioned species (Ochyra & Baryła 1988). The increasing extinction of mosses in many European countries has become sufficiently alarming for the problem to be addressed by a constantly growing group of bryologists who have tried to elucidate the causes of this phenomenon and to establish its scale as well as to propose measures to arrest it. Consequently, by the end of the 20th century, Red-lists of threatened mosses were available for almost all European countries (Schumacker & Martiny 1995).

The movement supporting bryophyte protection was initially set up during the Sixth Meeting of Central and West European Bryologists (CEBWG) held in 1988 in Liblice, then in Czechoslovakia but now in the Czech Republic, when the European Committee for Conservation of Bryophytes (ECCB) was established (Schumacker 1989). ECCB aimed at to coordinate all work associated with bryophyte protection as well as to compile of a Red-list of threatened bryophytes in Europe. Two years later, in 1990, the first symposium Endangered Bryophytes in Europe – Causes and Conservation was organized in Uppsala, Sweden (Laaka 1991), and subsequent meetings are held every four years. In 1991 another committee was set up – the Bryophyte Specialist Group (BSG), which is affiliated to the Species Survival Commission (SSC) of the World Conservation Union (IUCN). A magnificent achievement of the ECCB was the publication of the Red Data Book of European Bryophytes (ECCB 1995), while the BSG published the Status Survey and Conservation Action Plan for Bryophytes containing the first World Red List of Bryophytes (Hallingbäck & Hodgetts 2000). A measure of the success of these committees and the whole international bryological community has been the inclusion of bryophytes in the Bern Convention and in the EU-Habitats Directive, European Community Directive and the Nature Conservation policy since these compel all European Union member states to provide for the legal protection of these plants (Hallingbäck 2003).

Poland belongs to the group of European countries for which Red-lists of threatened moss species were first compiled (Ochyra 1986). Twelve years have elapsed since the publication of the second edition of the Red-list of Threatened Mosses in Poland (Ochyra 1992). During this long period numerous field studies have been carried out, especially in bryologically under-investigated areas, which have yielded a wealth of new information on the moss flora of Poland. Of special importance have been works on the Atlas of the Geographical Distribution of Mosses in Poland (Ochyra & Szmajda 1983, Ochyra et al. 1985, 1988a, b, 1990, 1992; Bednarek-Ochyra et al. 1990, 1994; Szmajda et al. 1991) which resulted in the publication of distribution maps for 90 species, most belonging to the group of threatened mosses, with a summary of their ecology and the nature of their threats. Additionally, some issues concerning endangered mosses have been discussed in the Census Catalogue of Polish Mosses (Ochyra et al. 2003).

Because of the rapid growth of moss protection measures, we regard as urgent and indispensable publication of a new revised Red-list of threatened mosses which would

reflect the current state of knowledge of all threats affecting these plants in Poland. In the present list the old red data book categories of IUCN (1978) have been retained but we have already started work on the assessment of threatened moss species in Poland according to the new IUCN criteria (version 3.1, 2001) and in the near future this should result in the compilation of a new modern Red-list of Polish mosses.

The main aim of the present treatment is to present a list of moss species threatened in the Polish Carpathians and to compare it with the list of mosses threatened in the whole of Poland. Kondracki’s (1978, 1994) definition of the Polish Carpathians is adopted here and includes also the Outer Western Carpathians (Zewnętrzne Karpaty Zachodnie), the Outer Eastern Carpathians (Zewnętrzne Karpaty Wschodnie) and the Central Western Carpathians (Centralne Karpaty Zachodnie), numbered on Kondracki’s (1978, 1994) map as 513, 522 and 514, respectively.