What makes mosses unique?
Mosses had to defend themselves against their enemies over the last 350 million years. Therefore, developing defenses against fungal and bacterial attacks as well as feeding protection against insects, snails and slugs.
This natural talent of mosses - structurally simple plants but having a high degree of chemical complexity - can be used in the form of extracts, especially used as a rich source of valuable molecules for biotechnological applications.
A special feature of mosses is that they have no roots and absorb their nutrients over the entire surface. This is done by ion exchange. By this way, anorganic salts, which represent up to 50% of the particulate matter, is bound to the surface of these plants, thus withdrawn from the atmosphere and converted into phytomass.
Not only this specific property of capturing fine dust, but also the other characteristics such as capturing carbon dioxide, water buffering, evaporative cooling, …, ensure mosses provide ecosystem services as applied in greening applications.
