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Non-vascular plants are often among the first species to move into new and inhospitable territories, along with prokaryotes and protists, and thus function as pioneer species. [ citation needed ] Mosses and leafy liverworts have structures called phyllids that resemble leaves , but only consist of single sheets of cells with no internal air ...
Chloroplasts (green discs) and accumulated starch granules in cells of Bryum capillare. Botanically, mosses are non-vascular plants in the land plant division Bryophyta. They are usually small (a few centimeters tall) herbaceous (non-woody) plants that absorb water and nutrients mainly through their leaves and harvest carbon dioxide and sunlight to create food by photosynthesis.
Mosses were formerly grouped with the hornworts and liverworts as "non-vascular" plants in the division "bryophytes", all of them having the haploid gametophyte generation as the dominant phase of the life cycle. This contrasts with the pattern in all vascular plants (seed plants and pteridophytes), where the diploid sporophyte generation is ...
Non-vascular plants , with their different evolutionary background, tend to have separate terminology. Although plant morphology (the external form) is integrated with plant anatomy (the internal form), the former became the basis of the taxonomic description of plants that exists today, due to the few tools required to observe.
Hornworts are a group of non-vascular Embryophytes (land plants) constituting the division Anthocerotophyta (/ ˌ æ n θ oʊ ˌ s ɛ r ə ˈ t ɒ f ə t ə,-t ə ˈ f aɪ t ə /).The common name refers to the elongated horn-like structure, which is the sporophyte.
Marchantia, an example of a liverwort (Marchantiophyta) An example of moss (Bryophyta) on the forest floor in Broken Bow, Oklahoma. Bryophytes (/ ˈ b r aɪ. ə ˌ f aɪ t s /) [1] are a group of land plants (embryophytes), sometimes treated as a taxonomic division, that contains three groups of non-vascular land plants: the liverworts, hornworts, and mosses. [2]
In vascular plants, the principal generation or phase is the sporophyte, which produces spores and is diploid (having two sets of chromosomes per cell). (By contrast, the principal generation phase in non-vascular plants is the gametophyte, which produces gametes and is haploid, with one set of chromosomes per cell.)
The sporophyte remains small and dependent on the parent gametophyte for its entire brief life. All other living groups of land plants have a life cycle dominated by the diploid sporophyte generation. It is in the diploid sporophyte that vascular tissue develops. In some ways, the term "non-vascular" is a misnomer.