Mosses are especially well suited as bio-indicators for airborne contaminants as they have no roots and a very high surface-to-mass ratio.
Eva Decker, of the university’s Faculty of Biology, explained: “We use moss, because, by mass, it has a huge surface area. You can see all the structures and it can clean the dirt particles out of the air. Moss has shoots or spores, and from one of these spores you can grow a new plant. And using these spores we started to cultivate new plants in the laboratory.”