After the carefully maintained #Kokedera temple site was abandoned in the twelfth century, forest developed on the site, with a remarkable cover of mosses (120 species) carpeting the forest floor. Currently, this forest is particularly revered, as are, in other contexts, sacred forests from tropical regions that can constitute #biodiversity reserves in areas where the original forests have almost disappeared. #Japan (2009) © Claude Marcel Hladik #photography #Mosstodon