Well, it’s been awhile since my last post. But indeed our schedules are pretty tight, almost without office work – all in the field. Based on what I hear around, it’s been a very long and cool spring for the Mojave, which of course favored us in a couple ways – nice and pleasant field work, and more time to get some of our projects done before the coming high temperatures. As a matter of fact we have had a few weeks already which were above a hundred degrees. I must say that without an acclimation time, it is pretty hard to stay active as usual, especially in town where all the concrete and roads contribute to a temperature rise. With that said, last week I was lucky to attend my training up north and reveal for myself at least a tiny bit of Bryophytes’ diversity. The workshop focused on identification of different non-vascular plants – Liverworts, Hornworts, and Mosses, which was very exciting for me. It was very new to me, because even having a general idea about mosses and its main taxonomical groups I never had a chance to get deeper into the subject. Discovering characteristic features of different groups of mosses and liverworts, seeing them under the microscope was very interesting, exciting, and certainly rewarding. I would highly recommend to all botanists who are not particularly familiar with non-vascular plants, of course given some extra time and a good opportunity, to pay a little more attention to this subject. In the meantime I will definitely keep exploring them myself wherever I am. Until next time,

Andrii

WERC, Henderson, NV