With his round-pointed razor, Jean-Christophe Hauguel takes a small green strand of the bark of an elderberry. “In this type of bush we can find extraordinary things”exclaims this moss lover, while taking out his mini magnifying glass with LED bulbs to better examine his capture, housed in the palm of his hand. A dozen naturalists are dedicated, like him, to wandering among the trees of the Rompval forest, in Mers-les-Bains (Somme), sometimes squatting, playing with the ground, sometimes with their eyes glued to the trunks. Specialists or amateurs met with a common goal: to identify the species of bryophytes (a group of plants that includes mosses, liverworts and hornworts) that populate this preserved place on the cliffs of Picardy, the last natural coastal forest in the Somme department. , acquired about thirty years ago by the Conservatorio del Litoral.
“No bryological inventory has yet been carried out”Mr. Hauguel slips to his acolytes, to awaken their curiosity. The information collected will allow him to enrich the databases of the National Botanical Conservatory (CBN) of Bailleul (North), of which he is deputy director, and thus improve knowledge of the species present in the region.
Bryology currently remains a niche discipline: in France there are barely forty specialists. “Fifteen years ago, in botanical conservatories little importance was given to the study of moss”explains Jaoua Celle, bryologist at the CBN of the Massif Central. Within the working group on bryophytes of the CBN network, which coordinates with Johan Gourvil, head of flora projects at the French Biodiversity Office (OFB), the desire progressively arose to “give more visibility to these little things that we study.” The publication of the first departmental distribution atlas of the 1,385 species of bryophytes recorded in mainland France, scheduled for the end of November, will make this wish come true.
This document collects “Hundreds of thousands of data, some of which comes from field work and inventories dating back more than a century., argues Jaoua Celle. “There has been a lot of work on the part of botanical conservatories, if only to homogenize the data and validate it… which sometimes requires re-examining parts of the herbaria.”. The objective pursued is “value all this work done over a long period of time and have a synthetic map of the state of knowledge”supports Johan Gourvil.
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