E-Flora BC: Electronic Atlas of the Flora of British Columbia

Species description:
Genus named in honour of N.J. de Necker, an 18th-century German botanist. Species named in honour of David Douglas, a well ­known, 19th-century Scottish plant explorer of western North America.

Comments:
This species is sometimes extremely abundant in humid coastal forests where it festoons tree branches and sheathes trunks of small trees and shrubs.

Distinguishing characteristics:
The usually soft, glossy, yellow-green, flattened shoots with undulate leaves and shining, relatively regular pin­nate branching serve as useful features, especially when sporophytes are present.

Habit:
Pale yellow-green, regularly to irregularly branched flattened shoots, hanging down on perpendicular sites and pendent on horizontal sites, sometimes forming dense mats.

Similar Species:
Notes under Metaneckera menziesii. : Neckera pennata plants are similar in some respects but the leaves are glossy, while those of Metaneckera are somewhat dull; N. pennata also lacks fragile slender branchlets. N. doug/asii also lacks the branchlets and tends to be pale yellow-green with sporophytes on a conspicuous elongate seta, unlike the short seta of N. pennata and Metaneckera. Species of Plagiothecium are all irregularly branched, pro­duce sporophytes on an elongate seta that emerges on the upper side of the shoot, and lack brittle lateral branchlets.