FloraOfNewZealand-Mosses-24-Fife-2015-Seligeriaceae
The Seligeriaceae are a family of six genera of predominantly temperate to cool-temperate distribution. Blindia and Seligeria are the largest genera. The former is primarily a southern hemisphere genus, albeit one with a northern hemisphere type. Seven species of Blindia occur in N.Z. Its members occur most commonly on non-calcareous rocks in moving water and they can form a conspicuous part of the aquatic flora of N.Z. streams. There is a strong southern bias to the N.Z. distribution of the genus, and only three of the seven species are known from the North I. The generic name Blindia is not used in early N.Z. literature and this can lead to confusion concerning early collections, which were assigned to other genera. The great Finnish bryologist Brotherus was the first to circumscribe Blindia in its modern sense, while Dixon was the first to discuss the genus in a N.Z. context. The variation of some N.Z. Blindia species is great and this makes the identification of some sterile collections difficult. However, even sterile plants of the genus usually present a distinctive facies. When leaves are stripped from the stem, leaf base fragments often persist on a stiff and often brittle stem, giving it a distinctive roughened appearance. In species with differentiated alar cells, the pigmented, abruptly differentiated and auriculate alar group is characteristic. Seligeria, by contrast, includes mostly minute plants that grow on weathered calcareous or cation-rich rock. This genus of c. 19 species is mostly distributed in temperate regions of the northern hemisphere and only two species are recorded from N.Z. These tiny plants are very unlikely to be collected, except when capsules are present. Seligeria cardotii occurs nearly throughout the country on sheltered and weathered limestone; it also occurs in Tasmania. The endemic and much rarer S. diminuta is known only from limestone crevices in Canterbury L.D. and is among the least collected moss species in N.Z. It is currently given a conservation ranking of nationally critical (the mostly highly threatened ranking for a plant in N.Z.) and its habitats are threatened by rock climbing activities in the Broken River basin.
Additional Information
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Data last updated | December 9, 2015 |
| Metadata last updated | November 18, 2015 |
| Created | November 18, 2015 |
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