Hello Ms. Kaleigh Walther,

Firstly I congratulate you on selecting a topic often underappreciated and largely ignored for you undergraduate botany major research. Due to their amphibious nature, liverworts and hornworts rely heavily on both the land and the presence of water for their sustenance, thus making them excellent candidates for observing effects of ecological contaminants on them.

Your topic should focus on the insidious (or augmentative) effects of aeolian and hydrological deposits on the gametangial development in the species of the choice.

or,

Your research subject can also veer around the membrane rupture and cytosolic leakage leading to photosynthetic breakdown among bryophytes when they are exposed to ozone and/or ammonia.

or,

Effect of mercury on bryophytes regarding the damage on chlorophyll and loss of intracellular K+ ions.

I sincerely hope that I have helped you to find the direction needed to jump start your research.

Dr. Abhishek Mukherjee

@ Dr. Abhishek Mukherjee

Thank you very much for your ideas! Those all sound very interesting, but I fear for my Undergraduate research, they all may be a little out of my league. My professor has instructed me to stay simple, considering we don't have many laboratory resources that we can utilize. I will keep these topics in mind when I go for my Masters degree though!

I think I have decided that I want to study how bryophytes affects soil makeup, including soil respiration and abundance of soil microorganisms. IE: How they may increase or decrease the quality of the soil.

I don't have ideas for you, but could suggest some avenues for exploration. Janice Glime is Professor Emerita at Michigan Tech, and her profile on their website describes her as :

"the founder and manager of Bryonet-l (the internet discussion group sponsored by the International Association of Bryologists) and is ex officio council member (2009-2013) of the International Association of Bryologists as its outgoing president (2005-2009). In addition to bryophyte ecology, her primary interest is in training college teachers and in improving college level teaching, to which end she developed her own text for botany, laboratory manuals for organismal biology, botany, and bryology, and is writing an online encyclopedia on bryophyte ecology. She established the Department of Biological Sciences Learning Center and served as its faculty director."

Bryonet-I may be a useful forum for you, and the ebook on bryophyte ecology is well worth reading - it may also give you some ideas for your research project. She's on RG.

You may also be interested in some work being undertaken by Jill Kowal at Imperial College, looking at mutualisms between liverworts and fungi. She has recently published a paper called "From rhizoids to roots? Experimental evidence of mutualism between liverworts and ascomycete fungi", which you'll be able to find if you look her up on RG.

That sounds interesting! :)