Sphagnum in establishment of new populations in disturbed habitats and on islands. Decayed, dried sphagnum moss has the name of peat or peat moss. This is used as a soil conditioner which increases the soil's capacity to hold water and nutrients by increasing capillary forces and cation exchange capacity. This is often necessary when dealing with very sandy soil, or plants that need increased or steady moisture content to flourish. A distinction is sometimes made between sphagnum moss, the live moss growing on top of a peat bog, and 'sphagnum peat moss' (North American usage) or 'sphagnum peat' (British usage), the
Plant functional type Plant functional type Plant functional types (PFTs) is a system used by climatologists to classify plants according to their physical, phylogenetic and phenological characteristics as part of an overall effort to develop a vegetation model for use in land use studies and climate models. PFTs provide a finer level of modeling than biomes, which represent gross areas such as desert, savannah, deciduous forest. In creating a PFT model, areas as small as 1 km are modeled by defining the predominant plant type for that area, interpreted from satellite data or other means. For each plant functional type, a number of