Non-vascular plants are plants without a vascular systemconsisting ofxylem and phloem. Although non-vascular plants lack these particular tissues, many possess simpler tissues that are specialized for internal transport of water. Non-vascular plants include two distantly related groups:
Algae - especially the green algae. Recent studies have demonstrated that the algae consist of several unrelated groups. Only those groups of algae included in the Viridiplantae are still considered relatives of land plants.
These groups are sometimes referred to as "lower plants", referring to their status as the earliest plant groups to evolve, but the usage is imprecise, since both groups are polyphyletic and may be used to include vascularcryptogams, such as the ferns and fern allies that reproduce using spores. Non-vascular plants are often among the first species to move into new and inhospitable territories, along with prokaryotes and protists, and thus function as pioneer species. Non-vascular plants do not have a wide variety of specialized tissue types. Mosses and leafy liverworts have structures called phyllids that look like leaves, but are not true leaves because they are single sheets of cells with no internal air spaces, no cuticle or stomata and no xylem or phloem. Consequently, phyllids are unable to control the rate of water loss from their tissues and are said to be poikilohydric. Some liverworts, such as Marchantia have a cuticle and the sporophytes of mosses have both cuticles and stomata, which were important in the evolution of land plants. All land plants have a life cycle with an alternation of generations between a diploid sporophyte and a haploid gametophyte, but in all non-vascular land plants the gametophyte generation is dominant. In these plants, the sporophytes grow from and are dependent on gametophytes for taking in water and mineral nutrients and for provision of photosynthate, the products of photosynthesis.
