Among the vast diversity of plants, we often focus our admiration, conservation efforts and research on vascular plants: the towering trees, flowering shrubs, and beneficial grasses and herbs. However, this emphasis reveals a bias that leaves the non-vascular plants — the tiny, overlooked, inconspicuous plants — hidden in the shadows, literally. These ‘lower plants’, as the research community likes to call them, lack the majestic height, vascular structures, roots, and flowers of their larger relatives and so rarely capture our attention. However, they are key to some of the Earth’s most extreme and vulnerable habitats.

Bryophytes, non-vascular plants that include mosses, liverworts and hornworts¹, flourish in environments where even the hardiest vascular plant species cannot survive. They thrive on mountaintops, in the polar tundra, cool shrublands, and under dark forest canopies, where they have key roles in nitrogen cycling, regulating microclimates, storing carbon, pioneering new ecosystems, and serving as bio-indicators of pollution^2,3.

在种类繁多的植物中，我们经常将钦佩、保护工作和研究集中在维管植物上：参天高耸的树木、开花的灌木以及有益的草本植物和草药。然而，这种强调揭示了一种偏见，即让非维管植物——微小的、被忽视的、不起眼的植物——真正地隐藏在阴影中。这些研究界喜欢称它们为“低等植物”，缺乏它们较大的亲戚的雄伟高度、维管结构、根和花，因此很少引起我们的注意。然而，它们是地球上一些最极端和最脆弱的栖息地的关键。

苔藓植物是非维管植物，包括苔藓、地钱和金缕梅¹，在即使是最顽强的维管植物物种也无法生存的环境中茁壮成长。它们在山顶、极地苔原、凉爽的灌木丛和黑暗的森林树冠下茁壮成长，在氮循环、调节小气候、储存碳、开拓新的生态系统以及作为污染的生物指标方面发挥着关键作用^2,3。