Welcome to the Species Finder

The new Species Finder is your gateway to a wealth of information about the mosses, liverworts and hornworts to be found in the UK. Ultimately, we hope to include a page dedicated to each species, with identification tips, up-to-date distribution information, links to useful resources and an image gallery showing a range of images including habitat photos, close-ups and microscope images.

These pages will gradually be built up over time, and we need your help to ensure the information they contain is useful, accurate and interesting. So please, if you have any identification tips, images that show typical features of a species (or just show how beautiful they are!), or comments and feedback on existing pages, let us know by emailing webmaster@britishbryologicalsociety.org.uk.

If you would like to volunteer to contribute some missing species in their entirety, please also contact us at the above email address. The more species we cover, the more useful this resource will become.

Thank you!

Filter our alphabetical list to locate a species

Click on one of the category boxes below to select Hornworts, Liverworts or Mosses. Then expand the relevant letter to find the species you’re looking for.

Click on the * category to view Species pages that are considered ‘complete’ i.e. they have additional notes if relevant and sufficient images to be useful. Note that other pages may have some images, but we know they need more work.

These pages use Latin names as that is what most bryologists use all the time. Common names for bryophytes do exist, but are often confusingly similar and frequently not very intuitive. Taxonomists are constantly discovering new facts about species which mean that they get moved into a different genus, or split into 2 species, or other changes. See below for more on this subject.

Note for beginners and users of the BBS Field Guide

The UK checklist of bryophyte names has recently undergone significant change (as of January 2021). For the time being we will retain both the old and new names in the species list, although both will link to the same species page which will use the new names. Therefore, if you select a species name from the Field Guide such as Orthotrichum lyellii, and end up on a page called Pulvigera lyellii, this isn’t a mistake! To make this more obvious, old names will be ‘greyed out’ in the species list.