If systematic botany is to some extent a 'Cinderella' science, then bryology is an even poorer relative. Not only is it poorly funded, bryophytes are also seen as a 'difficult' group, and this has severely hindered the progress of bryology in those parts of the world where bryophytes provide a significant contribution to the flora - that is, the tropics.

  Particularly in Africa, historically nearly all the work has been done by non-Africans, and often by Europeans who had never set foot in Africa, but used collections sent back by explorers and colonial administrators - although very occasionally we see the annotation 'native collector' on a specimen. The resulting publications usually appeared in Europe, in French, German, Italian, Portuguese or English, for the benefit mainly of European bryologists. The effort spent in this activity was documented in thousands of journal pages, virtually none of which was available to Africans - and indeed still isn't.

  True, the situation has improved in the last few decades, but there is still a dependency on the non-Africans, who have access to the type specimens and literature, to make this available in a suitable form, so that Africans can take control of their own flora.   Publishing floras that cost a months' income isn't a good way to encourage this, and it certainly isn't a good way to encourage an increase in interest in a discipline that is notoriously inapproachable and in a continent known for its financial poverty.
  This boils down to an enormous threshold to overcome - how can we expect progress to be made in science and conservation if people don't have the tools to do it, and have no means to acquire those tools? How do we measure diversity when people are unable to identify the plants they see? Literature on African bryophytes is scattered through dozens of journals over 200 years, and all that exists to pull this together is a few local floras, most produced decades ago. The tropics, almost as a whole, have been severely neglected.

   This is the vicious circle. The people responsible for diversity surveys in the most threatened areas of Africa are often unable to identify bryophytes, but bryophytes represent a significant biomass in the tropics and they also contribute significantly to the complexity and survival of the forest, particularly in water management - but they get missed from the diversity schedule, and this reduces the force of the argument for sensible management of bryophyte-rich areas.

  It isn't easy to break through this. Here and there are people who are determined to study bryophytes even if they don't have any literature - they identify taxa, even if they can't give them a name. It's often at this point that people try to make contact with bryologists outside of Africa, or with bryologists elsewhere on the continent, looking to find names for their discoveries, and this is increasingly easy with email and websites. Unfortunately here the trail can run cold - not every bryologist welcomes contact in this way. Working on African bryophytes thus requires a deal of patience - and we have to remember that despite its problems, Africa still has a unique and important flora, as well as some outstanding botanists, and we have a duty to do what we can to help those in Africa to preserve and protect their heritage.

While I've been talking, the images being shown are both to remind you what bryophytes look like, and also to demonstrate the level of diversity.

(talk continues below)

The dark line shows division between the mediterranean north and sub-Saharan Africa, and the equator is exactly in the middle.

Mosses

Note that one of these is now 90 years old, and only 3 are contempory.

Hepatics

In summary:

Our final goal is Bryologia Africana, a species level flora for sub-Saharan Africa. This was the concept of the late Paul W. Richards, best known for his amazing treatise 'The Tropical Rainforest' - but this is still a distant target.

We had set up a tropical bryology group in the British Bryological Society in 1987 and we started to use the internet when we first created a BBS website in 1996, but when the website was redeveloped in 2003:

we set up a separate Tropical Bryology Group website which meant we could have full control and to make updates whenever we wanted.

We made our first trip to Africa in 1991, to Malawi, and over the next couple of years added significantly to the Malawi checklist.

By this time, we were able to publish moss and hepatic checklists for the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. However, when we wanted to update these checklists, we realised that we had a publication problem - what journal would want to publish a new (and very long) checklist every couple of years?

So we created a company called Tropical Bryology Research:

and a journal: Tropical Bryology Research Reports, so we could publish them ourselves - making the checklist free to download from the website, but also offering a bound version for sale, at a price to cover the material costs; volumes 4 and 5 are shown below:

We were also keen to continue fieldwork in Africa, and arranged a three year programme of annual visits to Uganda (1996-8), funded by the Darwin Initiative, and feeling rather more confidant about our abilities, we decided that the end product would be a full bryophyte flora for the country, and we decided to publish the taxonomic treatments on-line on the TBG website in parallel with the publications. The screen shots below show the home page and two of the earliest teatments.

We were ready to consider a country flora, and we had full checklists for all of Africa, but Bryologia Africana was still a long way away. Not only was it a very large flora, we doubted the value of many of the species, as it resulted in genera with large numbers of endemic species, often with ill-described and ill-defined characters - not a scenario that most doctoral students would want to take on, particularly as these are pantropical genera - and also not something that amateur bryologists would want to tackle. Imagine having to identify the species of a genus with 50-100 taxa, with nothing but the original descriptions to look at (if you could find them), and in some cases, with the type specimen being the only known collection (and many tropical bryophyte types were destroyed by fire in 1943).

At this point we discovered that a bryophyte flora of tropical America down to genus level was being produced, which if we applied the same concept to Africa....

....would require 509 bryophyte genera to be described, rather than 3862 species.

Missouri Botanical Garden agreed to publish it, we found authors for all the families, and progress was good initially, but after about three years and with about 60% completed we were grinding to a halt. It seemed that the longer the project took, the more likely it was that authors wouldn't deliver, and indeed, by this time, some of the first-completed treatments were already in need of some changes - largely because of the vast increase in molecular phylogeny data, which has had a significant effect on bryology.

We also saw the contributions to the Bryophyte volumes of Flora of North America appearing on the web, with full text and illustrations.

After consulation with Missouri, we decided that the solution was yet another website, our third, and in May 2005 launched GBAonline :

You may not be able to read the menu on the left, but you can enter GBA via a key to families, or just jump straight in to the family you want:

A typical genus treatment:

This allowed us to make all contributions immediately available, and if anything gets out of date it can be updated - and we can add the missing families as they are produced - and generally make the whole project more visible. We have already seen an increase in author activity, and expect now to have both a book and a website in parallel - and for the website it would also be possible to add species level treatments if these were available for us to use, and we see this as a continuing, long term, project towards Bryologia Africana (the species level bryophyte flora).

We are hoping to keep the price of the GBA book as cheap as possible, but this might still be too much for some potential purchasers, but many schools and I think all universities in Africa now have internet access and so could get this information for free, and even copy it for local usage.

So this is the happy ending.

1. Publish contributions on the internet as they are produced
2. Update contributions if necessary
3. Publish on paper when ready
4. Add species level treatments to the internet as they become available
5. Publish Bryologia Africana when ready

It's easy to be overwhelmed by what needs doing on a project like this, but we can now provide solutions that are both cheap and appropriate - and we have to look to the internet rather than traditional paper publication as the most immediate and useful solution. Paper publications are necessary and helpful, but are relatively expensive, and get out of date. The internet may be less authoritative, but is more flexible and can be kept up to date.

This isn't a world-shattering project, but it does show that amateur bryologists, with no funding, can take on a major project, and although this is obviously still a work in progress, we seem to have a found, through the internet, a successful solution to what was appearing to be a never ending project.