Plant Biology and Classification

Its fiddleheads are used as a cooked vegetable in Japan and are believed to be responsible for the high rate of stomach cancer in Japan. It is also one of the world's most important agricultural weeds, especially in the British highlands and often poisons cattle and horses.

Ferns are vascular plants differing from lycophytes by having true leaves (megaphylls) which are often pinnate. They differ from seed plants (gymnosperms and angiosperms) in their mode of reproduction, lacking flowers and seeds.

Sphagnum accumulations can store water, since both living and dead plants can hold large quantities of water inside their cells, plants may hold up to 1 billion times as much water as their dry weight depending on the species. The empty cells help retain water in drier conditions. Hence, as sphagnum moss grows, it can slowly spread into drier conditions, forming larger peatlands, both raised bogs and blanket bogs.

Botanically, mosses are non-vascular plants in the land plant division Bryophyta. They are small (a few centimeters tall) herbaceous (non-woody) plants that absorb water and nutrients mainly through their leaves and harvest carbon dioxide and sunlight to create food by photosynthesis.

Colura zoophaga is a small epiphytic liverwort . It possesses elongated water sacs formed by the fusion of the upper leaf margin rolling inward down to the rest of the leaf. A funnel-shaped channel at the lower leaf margin leads to a small opening into the water sac and is covered by a movable lid that only open inward. It is because of this bladder-like configuration that these traps have been compared to those of Utricularia.

Flabellidium spinosum was a species of moss in the Brachytheciaceae family. It was endemic to Bolivia. It is also known as the Santa Cruz Bryophyte.

Coralline algae are red algae in the order Corallinales. They are characterised by a thallus that is hard because of calcareous deposits contained within the cell walls. The colours of these algae are most typically pink, or some other shade of red, but other species can be purple, yellow, blue, white or gray-green.

C. merolae is a club-shaped, unicellular red algae that lives in highly acidic environments and in warm conditions. Merolae has a single chloroplast and a single mitochondrion, but lacks a vacuole and a cell wall. The organism's genome was the first full algal genome to be sequenced in 2004. Its plastid was sequenced in 2000, 2003 and its mitochondrion in 1998.

William Mitten  was the premier bryologist in the second half of the nineteenth century. A pharmaceutical chemist by trade and never a professional botanist, he classified and named thousands of bryophyte specimens which came into Kew Gardens from around the vast British empire.

The thallophytes are in the most primitive plants, lacking roots, stems, leaves, and conducting cells. The simplest thallophytes are in the subphylum of autophytic thallophytes, which include blue-green bacteria (or cyanobacteria, formerly known as blue-green algae), diatoms, and algae.

Asplenium listeri, commonly known as the Christmas Island Spleenwort, is a species of fern in the Aspleniaceae family. It is endemic to Christmas Island, an Australian territory in the north-eastern Indian ocean.

Chara often grows at the bottom of lakes in fresh and also some brackish waters one to six metres deep. Chara is common in freshwater areas with silty or sandy beds. It is usually more noticed in droughts when the water level drops.

Somneratia roots are not modified to perform hygroscopic function. They perform respiratory function.

Plants which bears pneumatophores are called Halophytes

Euhrychiopsis lecontei and its assumed keystone effects on aquatic plant species diversify by foraging on nuisance Eurasian Watermilfoil.