Checklist of the Bryophytes of Bogotá, D.C., Colombia

Bogotá, located in central Colombia, lies on the eastern edge of the northern Andes. The city maintains a stable average annual temperature of 14 °C, with minimal variation. Annual rainfall reaches approximately 1,000 mm, and relative humidity averages 73% (Appendix 1). Home to over 8 million inhabitants, Bogotá serves as Colombia’s political, economic, administrative, and cultural capital.

Bogotá spans a total area of 1,775 km², with 378 km² forming the metropolitan region. Administratively, the city is divided into 20 localities (Table 1; Figure 1), each responsible for managing and delivering public services. The rural areas feature páramos, high Andean forests, rivers, and streams, while the urban zones include wetlands, parks, and the Bogotá Botanical Garden.

Figure 1:

Administrative map of Bogotá.

This research compiles data from the Colombian National Herbarium (COL), the Herbarium of the Bogotá Botanical Garden (JBB), and the Tropicos (2025) database of the Missouri Botanical Garden.

The names of families, genera, species, and lower taxonomic ranks follow the latest catalogs for Colombia: Gradstein (2021) for liverworts and hornworts, and Churchill (2016) and Churchill et al. (2020) for mosses.

The bryophyte diversity within the political jurisdiction of Bogotá’s Capital District represents 25% of the total known at the national level. It includes 450 species – 279 mosses, 167 liverworts, and 4 hornworts (Table 2) – distributed across 178 genera (127 mosses, 49 liverworts, and 2 hornworts) and grouped into 80 families (50 mosses, 28 liverworts, and 2 hornworts).

Among mosses, the families with the highest species diversity are Pottiaceae, Leucobryaceae, Bartramiaceae, Bryaceae, and Brachytheciaceae. For liverworts, the most diverse families include Lejeuneaceae, Frullaniaceae, Plagiochilaceae, Lepidoziaceae, and Lophocoleaceae (Table 3). This study presents the first documented report of hornworts in Bogotá. The moss genera with the greatest species richness in the city are Campylopus, Fissidens, Leptodontium, and Sphagnum. Among liverworts, the genera with the highest taxonomic diversity are Frullania, Plagiochila, Metzgeria, and Cheilolejeunea (Table 4).

The specimens listed in this study come from 12 of Bogotá’s 20 localities. For a detailed overview of the rural and urban extention of each locality, see Appendix 1. The most species-rich areas are Sumapáz, Santafé, Ciudad Bolívar, Chapinero and Engativá (Figure 2).

Figure 2:

Distribution of bryophyte taxa across Bogotá’s localities, highlighting variation in species richness.

The predominant ecosystems include páramo, high Andean forests, urban areas and urban forests (Table 5, Figure 3) as follows: Sumapáz (78,095 Ha) is a completely rural locality composed mostly of páramo; Santafé (4,517 Ha) is characterized by high Andean forest and the presence of the San Francisco River; Ciudad Bolívar (12,999 Ha) contains páramo, Andean and subxerophytic forest; Chapinero (3,816 Ha) presents high Andean forest and numerous streams; Engativá (3,588 ha) is associated with urban forests including the Botanical Garden and other metropolitan parks.

Figure 3:

Representative ecosystems of Bogotá sampled for bryophytes. A. Páramo (Sumapáz); B. Urban Forest (Bogotá Botanical Garden); C. Montane Forest (eastern hills).

As part of the research initiatives led by the curation of the bryophyte collection at the Bogotá Botanical Garden between 2021 and 2025, various areas within the localities of Chapinero, Santafé, Engativá, and Ciudad Bolívar were sampled, covering 15.23% of the city’s territory and accounting for 51.59% of the total species recorded. However, a review of the databases revealed that only partial sampling has been conducted in Sumapáz, which comprises 47.2% of the territory. Despite this, Sumapáz harbors the highest diversity, representing 35.34% of the total species. In contrast, the localities of Usme and Suba, which together cover 19.29% of the territory, have been scarcely sampled and exhibit only 4% of the city’s species richness. These findings underscore the need to expand the geographic coverage of sampling efforts, particularly in areas where the relation between territorial extent and species diversity is disproportionately low (Figure 4).

Figure 4:

Correlation between the spatial extent of each locality and the diversity of bryophytes observed.

Additionally, analysis of the existing records reveals that Bryum argenteum accounts for 58% of the species representation across the city’s territory. Meanwhile, 54% of the species analyzed have only been collected once, and it is estimated that 2.22% of the total corresponds to endemic species (Table 6).

The number of species in the city known from a single specimen led to their classification under the criterion of “restricted extent of occurrence,” one of the conditions for assigning a “Vulnerable” risk status (IUCN, 2012). In Colombia, bryophytes considered at risk of extinction (Linares & Uribe, 2002; Instituto Humboldt, 2019; Ministerio de Ambiente, 2024) include 24 species found within the city. Among these, Cephaloziella divaricata has been categorized as Critically Endangered (CR), Metz-geria lechleri as Endangered (EN) - both also present in other countries - and Cyrto-hypnum arzobispoae as Vulnerable (VU), a species endemic to the city (Table 7).

The 450 bryophyte species reported for Bogotá in this study are distributed as follows: 196 in COL, 227 in JBB, and 261 in Tropicos. Table 8 provides further insights into the relationships among these data sources.

The principal bryophyte collectors in Bogotá have included Alexander Lindig (1813–1882), John Weir (–1898), Ellsworth Killip (1890-1968), Carl Troll (1899-1975), José Cuatrecasas (1903-1996), Helene Bischler (19322005), Thomas van der Hammen (1924-2010), Steve Churchill (1948-2023), Antoine Cleef (1941), Jaime Aguirre (1951), and the first author. Notably, 60 species - representing 14% of those recorded in Bogotá - are known solely from one or two specimens collected by Lindig, Troll, or Weir in the 19th century. These specimens are housed in herbaria in Europe or the United States, due to the absence of national repositories at the time (Díaz-Piedrahíta, 2016).