Grimmia

Grimmia is a genus of mosses (Bryophyta), originally named by Jakob Friedrich Ehrhart in honour of Johann Friedrich Carl Grimm, a physician and botanist from Gotha, Germany.
Geographic distribution.
Although predominantly occurring in the moderate zones, representatives of the cosmopolitan genus "Grimmia" may be found in all parts of the world, from Alaska to the most southern point of Chile, and from Siberia to South Africa, though in tropic regions, e.g. Hawaii and Indonesia, "Grimmia" species only occur high up in the mountains.
Identification.
"Grimmia" is a notoriously difficult genus in terms of identification, and in the majority of herbaria a considerable number of species was found misidentified. The American bryologist Geneva Sayre (1911–1992), who worked for many years on a monograph of the North American "Grimmias", indicated in an original way these difficulties, as she said: "it contains an ambigua, a varia, a decipiens, a controversa, a revisa and at least two anomalas".
Publications.
In the "Index Muscorum", the genus "Grimmia" is represented with 800 names of published species. As since Loeske (1930), no revision of the European species had been carried out.
The Dutch bryologist H. C. Greven started in 1990 with "Grimmia" fieldwork and a revision of the "Grimmia" collections from important European herbaria. The results were published in ""Grimmia" Hedw. (Grimmiaceae, Musci) in Europe".
After examining the "Grimmia" collections from herbaria in North- and South America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, and about 50 "Grimmia" collecting trips in all continents, "Grimmias of the World" was published. An important contribution was the revision of "Grimmia" in North America.
In the past decades, some more bryologists became interested in the genus "Grimmia". Jesús Muñoz published a herbaria revision of "Grimmia" in Latin America, and Maier studied herbarium specimens of "Grimmia" from the Himalaya.
Classification.
The genus "Grimmia" contains the following species:
Latest discovered species.
In the past 15 years (1996 to 2010), the following "Grimmia" species have been discovered and described: