Customer Reviews

Outstanding Mosses & Liverworts of Pennsylvania & Nearby States

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The subject of this book, a guide to mosses and liverworts, is challenging. For those living in Pennsylvania and nearby states, all regional guides published in the last half century require taxonomic expertise. For liverworts, it's Rudolf Schuster's The Hepaticae and Anthocerotae of North America East of the Hundreth Meridian, 6 volumes, 4,668 pages, over a thousand dollars if you are lucky enough to find a copy. For mosses, it's Crum and Anderson's two volume Mosses of Eastern North America, 1328 pages, published over 35 years ago and available on Amazon for over $400. You might try How to Know the Mosses and Liverworts 2nd edition, by Conrad and Redfearn, but the guide covers the entire country and consists of dichotomous keys illustrated with line drawings.
Susan Munch's Outstanding Mosses & Liverworts of Pennsylvania and Nearby States is the only guide with color photographs. Spiral bound, 89 pages, and reasonably priced, it is designed to help people get started identifying mosses and liverworts. By selecting conspicuous and relatively common species, the author makes the process of identification feasible. For identifying specimens, I found it helpful to thumb through the pages and scan the photographs, much as I would a field guide to wildflowers. Opposite each page of photographs is a page of text describing the species illustrated. The photographs give sharp, close-up images of diagnostic features. The text is engaging and provides ecological and taxonomic information with a minimum of jargon. For more comprehensive taxonomic sources, the author provides a list of references.

This book is a good, field-based introduction to the common mosses and liverworts of the northeastern United States. It is an ideal starting point for those who have noticed mosses and liverworts and want to learn more. The large color photographs make it easy to recognize the most common species and the text describes the habitats where these plants can be found. Its size makes it easy to carry and use.

I am a Master Naturalist attempting to identify mosses of the Northern Neck of VIrginia and this is the closest to a guide for this area as I could find. I have found several and am now attempting to cross check with USDA and experts in the area. I would be lost without this book as a reference.

I have been looking for an introductory book on mosses and liverworts for my botanical club, and am happy to have found this one. The book is well thought out. It is small and spiral bound so that you can hold the open book flat in one hand. The pages are heavy with a smooth coating. The paper cover is also a good weight.

As soon as you open the cover -- either front or back -- you'll see how to identify these plants. Simple line drawings clearly depict the parts, with mosses on one page and liverworts on the other. There's an introduction that describes the life cycles of liverworts and mosses, their ecology and the main groups.

For the most part, each genus is allotted one spread, with photos on the left page and text on the right. The photos are clear. Where the caption describes a particular feature, the author points it out with a red arrow. The magnification is given for each photo, so you're not left to guess the actual size of a species. For example, there's a great shot of a Polytrichum capsule at 15 X magnification showing 64 teeth (who knew?), but most photos are lower magnification, so you'll do fine with a 10 X lens. The text descriptions complement the photos and also identify the most likely habitat for each genus.