Sphagnum baby. Several of the world's largest wetlands are sphagnum-dominated bogs, including the West Siberian Lowland, the Hudson Bay Lowland and the Mackenzie River Valley. These areas provide habitat for common and rare species. They also store large amounts of carbon, which helps reduce global warming. The U.S. gets up to 80% of sphagnum peat moss it uses from Canada. In Canada, the peat bog mass harvested each year is an estimated 1/60th of the mass that accumulates. About .02% of the 270 million acres (422,000 square miles) of Canadian peat bog are used for peat moss mining. Some efforts are
Moss in cities. Examples would be "Rhytidiadelphus squarrosus", a garden weed in Vancouver and Seattle areas; "Bryum argenteum", the cosmopolitan sidewalk moss, and "Ceratodon purpureus", red roof moss, another cosmopolitan species. A few species are wholly aquatic, such as "Fontinalis antipyretica", common water moss; and others such as "Sphagnum" inhabit bogs, marshes and very slow-moving waterways. Such aquatic or semi-aquatic mosses can greatly exceed the normal range of lengths seen in terrestrial mosses. Individual plants or more long are common in "Sphagnum" species for example. Wherever they occur, mosses require liquid water for at least part of the year to complete