Moss can absorb fifty thousand liters of rain per hectare in a single storm.

Evidence

Water is held in tapered leaf tips, funnelled into tiny drain pipes to the concave basins at the base of every leaf. Even the dead portions of the colony, the old leaves and tangled rhizoids, can trap moisture. The amount of rain held in Oregon mosses has never been measured, but in a mossy cloud forest in Costa Rica the mosses absorbed 50,000 liters of water per hectare of forest in a single rainfall. It’s easy to see how flooding follows quickly on the heels of deforestation. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 571

Categorization

• XREF: Directly serves the disturbance-history and water-cycle thread across the polyad; flooding-after-deforestation is a causal claim usable in landscape reading. — connects to: Mosses generate the humidity that sustains the entire rain forest food web — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 582