B. Papp szerk.: Studia Botanica Hungarica 34. 2003 (Budapest, 2003)

Szurdoki, Erzsébet: Peat mosses of North Hungary

Sphagnum contortum Schultz. It is a slender plant with yellowish, brown or ochre colour. Stem is palecoloured (green or brown) with 2-3 well-developed layers of hyaline cells. Stem leaves are small and fibrillose near the apex. It tolerates relatively high nutrient content (DANIELS and EDDY 1985). It is not rare in Hungary, but it has higher abundance in the westernmost part of the country. It usually lives in fens and sometimes in intermediate mires. In northern Hungary it only has a few occurrences (Table 1). Earlier it lived in Nagy-Mohos (ZÓLYOMI 1931), but it has not turned up during recent searches (SZURDOKI et al. in press). In the fens of the Komlóska and Kemence valley it has a large and relatively stable population, S. contortum is the most frequent peat moss there. Earlier it lived in 3 different locations along these streams and now it lives in 4 places (BOROS 1915-71, VAJDA 1933-78, SIMON 1977, SZURDOKI et al. 2000). There is a new population of S. contortum on one floating island of Zsid-tó (unpublished data of E. Szurdoki and Z. Tóth from 1999). S. contortum has stable populations in the Zemplén Mts, which survived the drier periods in the end of the 20th century. It will probably thrive there in the foreseeable future. Section Cuspidata The species of this section usually are medium-sized, sometimes small or robust. Their colour is green or brown, but never red (DANIELS and EDDY 1985). In Europe 13 species can be found, 6 of them live in Hungary, and all of these occur in North Hungary. Some of these are locally frequent, as S. angustifolium and S. fallax, while others are locally rare like S. riparium and S. cuspidatum (ORBÁN and VAJDA 1983, DANIELS and EDDY 1985, LÁJER 1998«, b, SZURDOKI et al. 2000). The S. recurvum complex was divided into numerous species (e.g. ISOVIITA 1966, DANIELS and EDDY 1985, FLATBERG 1991, 1992), and from them S.flexuosum, S. fallax and S. angustifolium live in Hungary. Since most available publications used only the name S. recurvum (e.g. ZÓLYOMI 1931, SIMON 1960, BOROS 1964, CZENTHE 1985, Dulai and Vojtkó 1991, Standovár et al, 1991), the earlier distribution of these species (which would be based on a few collections only) cannot be clearly established, and based only on the herbarium material of BP. Another difficulty is that usually two of them live together in one locality and sometimes not easy to distinguish them. There are two data of S. recurvum s. lato, which were not revised by the author. The first was recorded from Nagy-tó (Dulai and Vojtkó 1991) and it is still