Awards & distinctions

Dr. Sylvia Pressel, from the Natural History Museum in London, was awarded the Spruce Award in 2025 in recognition of her significant contributions to bryology throughout her career. Her research integrates expertise in bryophyte systematics, evolution, anatomy and in-vitro culturing to tackle major questions on the origin and evolution of key innovations of land plants including stomata, cuticles, desiccation- tolerance and fungal symbioses. Outstanding contributions internationally in many areas of bryology embracing liverworts, hornworts and mosses in equal measure. Her main contributions are  The discovery that the desiccation  depends on the polymerisation kinetics of the opening talk at the IAB cytoskeleton. The full documentation of fungal associations in hornworts and liverworts, and the demonstration that these are symbiotic. The discovery that the development of intercellular spaces in bryophytes differs fundamentally from that in vascular plants. Irrefutable evidence that the stomata of bryophytes have fixed apertures. The first bryophyte flora of Ascension Island. Her citation indices are impressive: citations 544 and h-index (a metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of a scientist’s published work) 37. See https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Silvia-Pressel/2 Reference: Bryological Times N°161, Dec. 2025

Nicole Fenton’s work focuses on fundamental questions related to bryophyte biology and conservation, and in particular, on bryophyte dispersal and community assembly in North American boreal forests. Her work has substantially contributed to our understanding of the roles of bryophytes in ecosystem functions, in both natural and managed landscapes. She developed and standardized the use of plant functional traits in bryology, a field of inquiry in which bryophytes have been underrepresented. She has published 109 peer-reviewed papers and four book chapters, which have gathered close to 3900 citations. Her work has appeared in various international journals reaching a broad audience.

Alain Vanderpoorten (University of Liège, Belgium) published nearly 200 studies spanning the fields of taxonomy, molecular biology, floristics, biogeography, ecology, and evolutionary biology, that have gathered about 4,500 citations. Most of his accomplishments emerge from collaborations with bryologists throughout the world and have been published in prestigious international journals, both bryological and broad spectrum, including Nature Communications, New Phytologist, Systematic Biology, Ecology Letters, and Critical Reviews in Plant Sciences. His early work focused on pleurocarps systematics and primarily Amblystegiaceae, particularly on ecology, population genetics, systematics, and character evolution. He then moved to bryogeography, leading major advances in understanding the processes that underpin long known distribution patterns of bryophytes. His highly innovative research on the settling velocity of spores has been instrumental in linking spore traits to dispersability and hence ranges in bryophytes. In 2009 Alain co-authored a comprehensive and extremely useful textbook on bryology, “Introduction to Bryophytes”, currently available as an e-book.

Matt Renner has made extraordinary contributions to our knowledge of bryology, extending to evolutionary biology in general. His main focus has been on systematics and taxonomy and evolutionary biology, as well as ecology, and translating this into action into conservation.

Lars Hedenäs, senior curator at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, is one of the world’s leading muscologists. His scientific publications (> 100) span a period of about 25 years and are truly outstanding. Lars is a specialist of pleurocarpous mosses and has published on numerous different aspects of this group, including classical taxonomy and nomenclature, molecular phylogeny, population genetics, reproductive biology, morphological adaptation, biogeography and ecology. In the IAB he has been very active as a council member, an editor of The Bryological Times and a member of the bryophyte conservation group.