Carbon Storage from the Lab
Our team established the world’s largest collection of Sphagnum moss species for peat industry and science. Since peat harvesting and climate change are threatening peatlands, their huge diversity of peat moss species are more and more unable to store the about 30% of the earth’s soil carbon that they currently bind. In doing so, they roughly store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests combined. Since there is not enough founder material available for sustainably cultivating peat mosses on a large scale, Melanie Heck from the team around plant biotechnologist Professor Ralf Reski from Freiburg University, Germany, established axenic in‐vitro cultures from sporophytes of 19 Sphagnum species. This work is part of our BMEL-funded MOOSzucht project in a collaboration with researchers from the University of Greifswald. These cultivated species cover five of the six European Sphagnum subgenera. This high‐quality founder material for diverse large‐scale applications is available via the International Moss Stock Center (IMSC). The work was published recently in New Phytologist.
Source: Freiburg University